At the head of the path above the orchard grows an old ash tree, and so leans that its boughs, now bursting into leaf, droop pendent almost as a weeping willow.  Between them you catch a glimpse of the Bristol Channel, blue-grey beyond a notch of the distant hills.  She pauses here for a look.  The moors that stretch for miles on all sides of Culvercoombe are very silent this sunny morning.  It is the season when the sportsman pauses and takes breath for a while, and neither gun nor horn is abroad.  The birds are nesting; the stag more than a month since has “hung his old head on the pale,” and hides while his new antlers are growing amid the young green bracken that would seem to imitate them in its manner of growth; the hinds have dropped their calves, and fare with them unmolested.  It is the moors’ halcyon time, and the weather to-day well befits it.

Tilda’s face is grave, however, as she stands there in the morning sunshine.  She is looking back upon the enclosure where the white stones overtop the bluebells.  They are headstones, and mark the cemetery where Miss Sally, not ordinarily given to sentiment, has a fancy for interring her favourite dogs.

You guess now why Tilda carries a spade, and what has happened, but may care to know how it happened.

Sir Elphinstone is paying a visit just now to Culvercoombe.  He regards Tilda with mixed feelings, and Tilda knows it.  The knowledge nettles her a little and amuses her a good deal.  Just now Miss Sally and he are improving their appetites for breakfast by an early canter over the moor, and no doubt are discussing her by the way.

Last night, with the express purpose of teasing him, Miss Sally had asked Tilda to take up a book and read to her for a while.  The three were seated in the drawing-room after dinner, and Sir Elphinstone beginning to grow impatient for his game of piquet.  On the hearth-rug before the fire were stretched Godolphus and three of Miss Sally’s prize setters; but Godolphus had the warmest corner, and dozed there stertorously.

The book chanced to be Gautier’s Emaux et Camees, and Tilda to open it at the Carnaval de Venise—­

   “Il est un vieil air populaire
     Par tous les violons racle,
    Aux abois de chiens en colere
     Par tous les orgues nasille.”

She read the first verse with a pure clear accent and paused, with a glance first at the hearth-rug, then at Sir Elphinstone in his chair.  Perhaps the sight of him stirred a small flame of defiance.  At any rate she closed the book, went straight to the piano, and recklessly rattled out the old tune, at once so silly and haunting.  Had she not heard it a thousand times in the old circus days?

Her eyes were on the keyboard.  Hardly daring to lift them, she followed up the air with a wild variation and dropped back upon it again—­not upon the air pure and simple, but upon the air as it might be rendered by a two-thirds-intoxicated coachful of circus bandsmen.  The first half-a-dozen bars tickled Miss Sally in the midriff, so that she laughed aloud.  But the laugh ended upon a sharp exclamation, and Tilda, still jangling, looked up as Sir Elphinstone chimed in with a “What the devil!” and started from his chair.