One day Learn took Fina for a walk to the Broad.  It was the most unselfish thing she could do, for her solitary rambles, her unaccompanied rides, were her greatest pleasures; save, indeed, when the solitude of these last was interrupted by Major Harrowby.  This, however, had not been nearly so often since the return of the families as before; for Adelaide’s pony-carriage was wellnigh ubiquitous, and Edgar did not care that the rector’s sarcastic daughter should see him escorting Leam in lonely places three or four times a week.  Thus, the girl had fallen back into her old habits of solitude, and to take the child with her was a sacrifice of which she herself only knew the extent.

But, if blindly and with uncertain feet, stumbling often and straying wide, Leam did desire to find the narrow way and walk in it—­to know the better thing and do it.  At the present moment she knew nothing better than to give nurse a holiday and burden herself with an uncongenial little girl as her charge and companion when she would rather have been alone.  So this was how it came about that on this special day the two set out for the Broad, where Fina had a fancy to go.

The walk was pleasant enough, Leam was not called on to rack her brains—­those non-inventive brains of hers, which could not imagine things that never happened—­for stories wherewith to while away the time, as Fina ran alone, happy in picking the spring flowers growing thick on the banks and hedgerows.  Thus the one was amused and the other was left to herself undisturbed; which was an arrangement that kept Leam’s good intentions intact, but prevented the penance which they included from becoming too burdensome.  Indeed, her penance was so light that she thought it not so great a hardship, after all, to make little Fina her companion in her rambles if she would but run on alone and content herself with picking flowers that neither scratched nor stung, and where therefore neither the surgery of needles nor the dressing of dock-leaves was required, nor yet the supplementary soothing of kisses and caresses for her tearful, sobbing, angry pain.

The Broad, always one of the prettiest points in the landscape, was to-day in one of its most interesting phases.  The sloping banks were golden with globe-flowers and marsh “mary-buds,” and round the margin, was a broad belt of silver where the starry white ranunculus grew.  All sorts of the beautiful aquatic plants of spring were flowering—­some near the edges, apparently just within reach, tempting and perilous, and some farther off and manifestly hopeless:  the leaves of the water-lilies, which later would be set like bosses of silver and gold on the shimmering blue, had risen to the surface in broad, green, shining platters, and the low-lying branches of the trees at the edge dipped in the water and swayed with the running stream.