The road thereabouts was lonely.  A canal ran parallel with it at a distance of fifty yards, and on the canal a boat was moving in the direction of Hanbridge at the rate of a mile an hour.  Such was the only other vehicle in sight.  The outskirts of Knype, the nearest town, did not begin until at least a mile further on; and the Countess, dressed for the undoing of mayors and other unimpressionable functionaries, could not possibly have walked even half a mile in that rich dark mud.  She thanked him, and without a word to her servants took the seat beside him.

III

Immediately the mule began to trot the Countess began to smile again.  Relief and content were painted upon her handsome features.  Denry soon learnt that she knew all about mules—­or almost all.  She told him how she had ridden hundreds of miles on mules in the Apennines, where there were no roads, and only mules, goats and flies could keep their feet on the steep, stony paths.  She said that a good mule was worth forty pounds in the Apennines, more than a horse of similar quality.  In fact, she was very sympathetic about mules.  Denry saw that he must drive with as much style as possible, and he tried to remember all that he had picked up from a book concerning the proper manner of holding the reins.  For in everything that appertained to riding and driving the Countess was an expert.  In the season she hunted once or twice a week with the North Staffordshire Hounds, and the Signal had stated that she was a fearless horsewoman.  It made this statement one day when she had been thrown and carried to Sneyd senseless.

The mule, too, seemingly conscious of its responsibilities and its high destiny, put its best foot foremost and behaved in general like a mule that knew the name of its great-grandfather.  It went through Knype in admirable style, not swerving at the steam-cars nor exciting itself about the railway bridge.  A photographer who stood at his door manoeuvring a large camera startled it momentarily, until it remembered that it had seen a camera before.  The Countess, who wondered why on earth a photographer should be capering round a tripod in a doorway, turned to inspect the man with her lorgnon.

They were now coursing up the Cauldon Bank towards Hanbridge.  They were already within the boundaries of Hanbridge, and a pedestrian here and there recognised the Countess.  You can hide nothing from the quidnunc of Hanbridge.  Moreover, when a quidnunc in the streets of Hanbridge sees somebody famous or striking, or notorious, he does not pretend that he has seen nobody.  He points unmistakably to what he has observed, if he has a companion, and if he has no companion he stands still and stares with such honest intensity that the entire street stands and stares too.  Occasionally you may see an entire street standing and staring without any idea of what it is staring at.  As the equipage dashingly approached