Now, Miss Adamson had been brought up a Presbyterian of the Presbyterians, and among people to whom “the paper” was abhorrent:  to read a sermon was a sin—­to read another man’s sermon was a sin of double-dyed blackness.  However, either her opinions were being corrupted or enlightened, either she was growing lax in principle or she was learning the lesson of toleration, for she allowed the remarks of Lady Arthur to pass unnoticed, so that that lady did not need to advance the well-known opinion and practice of Sir Roger de Coverley to prop her own.

Miss Adamson merely said, “Do you not underrate Mr. Eildon’s abilities?”

“I think not.  If he had abilities, he would have been showing them by this time.  But of course I don’t blame him:  few of the Eildons have been men of mark—­none in recent times except Lord Arthur—­but they have all been respectable men, whose lives would stand inspection; and George is the equal of any of them in that respect.  As a clergyman he would have set a good example.”

Hearing a person always pitied and spoken slightingly of does not predispose any one to fall in love with that person.  Miss Garscube’s feelings of this nature still lay very closely folded up in the bud, and the early spring did not come at this time to develop them in the shape of George Eildon; but Mr. Eildon was sufficiently foolish and indiscreet to fall in love with her.  Miss Adamson was the only one of the three ladies cognizant of this state of affairs, but as her creed was that no one had any right to make or meddle in a thing of this kind, she saw as if she saw not, though very much interested.  She saw that Miss Garscube was as innocent of the knowledge that she had made a conquest as it was possible to be, and she felt surprised that Lady Arthur’s sight was not sharper.  But Lady Arthur was—­or at least had been—­a woman of the world, and the idea of a penniless man allowing himself to fall in love seriously with a penniless girl in actual life could not find admission into her mind:  if she had been writing a ballad it would have been different; indeed, if you had only known Lady Arthur through her poetry, you might have believed her to be a very, romantic, sentimental, unworldly person, for she really was all that—­on paper.

Mr. Eildon was very frequently in the studio where Miss Adamson and her pupil worked, and he was always ready to accompany them in their excursions, and, Lady Arthur said, “really made himself very useful.”

It has been said that John and Thomas both approved of her ladyship’s summer expeditions in search of the picturesque, or whatever else she might take it into her head to look for; and when she issued orders for a day among the hills in a certain month of August, which had been a specially fine month in point of weather, every one was pleased.  But John and Thomas found it nearly as hard work climbing with the luncheon-basket in the heat of the midsummer sun as it was when they climbed to the same elevation in midwinter; only they did not slip back so fast, nor did they feel that they were art and part in a “daftlike” thing.