When luncheon was over her ladyship as often as not ordered her servants to take the carriage round by the turnpike-road to a given point, where she arranged to meet it, while she herself struck right over the hills as the crow flies, crossing the burns on her way in the same manner as the Israelites crossed the Red Sea, only the water did not stand up on each side and leave dry ground for her to tread on; but she ignored the water altogether, and walked straight through.  The young ladies, knowing this, took an extra supply of stockings and shoes with them, but Lady Arthur despised such effeminate ways and drove home in the footgear she set out in.  She was a woman of robust health, and having grown stout and elderly and red-faced, when out on the tramp and divested of externals she might very well have been taken for the eccentric landlady of a roadside inn or the mistress of a luncheon-bar; and probably her young footman did not think she answered to her own name at all.

There is a divinity that doth hedge a king, but it is the king’s wisdom to keep the hedge close and well trimmed and allow no gaps:  if there are gaps, people see through them and the illusion is destroyed.  Lady Arthur was not a heroine to her footman; and when she traversed the snow-slush and walked right through the burns, he merely endorsed the received opinion that she wanted “twopence of the shilling.”  If she had been a poor woman and compelled to take such a journey in such weather, people would have felt sorry for her, and have been ready to subscribe to help her to a more comfortable mode of traveling; but in Lady Arthur’s case of course there was nothing to be done but to wonder at her eccentricity.

But her ladyship knew what she was about.  The sleep as well as the food of the laboring man is sweet, and if nobility likes to labor, it will partake of the poor man’s blessing.  The party arrived back among the luxurious appointments of Garscube Hall (which were apt to pall on them at times) legitimately and bodily tired, and that in itself was a sensation worth working for.  They had braved difficulty and discomfort, and not for a nonsensical and fruitless end, either:  it can never be fruitless or nonsensical to get face to face with Nature in any of her moods.  The ice-locked streams, the driven snow, the sleep of vegetation, a burst of sunshine over the snow, the sough of the winter wind, Earth waiting to feel the breath of spring on her face to waken up in youth and beauty again, like the sleeping princess at the touch of the young prince,—­all these are things richly to be enjoyed, especially by strong, healthy people:  let chilly and shivering mortals sing about cozy fires and drawn curtains if they like.  Besides, Miss Adamson had the eye of an artist, upon which nothing, be it what it may, is thrown away.

But an expedition to a hill with “rings” undertaken on a long midsummer day looked fully more enjoyable to the common mind:  John, and even the footman approved of that, and another individual, who had become a frequent visitor at the hall, approved of it very highly indeed, and joined such a party as often as he could.