“What a mercy I wrote that letter!” she said to herself, with a sigh of content.  She was thinking of a proposal that had come to her a few days before this date, to take a post as drawing mistress in a Brighton school.  The salary was tempting; and, at the moment, money was more than usually scarce in the family purse.  Her mother’s eyes had looked at her wistfully.

Yet she had refused; with a laughing bravado that had concealed some inward qualms.

Whereupon the gods had immediately and scandalously rewarded her.  She had sold four of her drawings at a Liverpool exhibition for twenty pounds; and there were lying beside her on the grass some agreeable press notices just arrived, most of which she already knew by heart.

Twenty pounds!  That would pay the half year’s rent.  And there were three other drawings in a London show that might very well sell too.  Why not—­now the others had sold?  Meanwhile she—­thank the Lord!—­had saved herself, as a fish from the hook.  She was still free; free to draw, free to dream.  She had not bartered her mountains for a salary.  Instead of crocodile walks, two and two, with a score of stupid schoolgirls, here she was, still roaming the fells, the same happy vagabond as before.  She hugged her liberty.  And at the same time she promised herself that her mother should have a new shawl and a new cap for Whitsuntide.

Those at present in use came near in Lydia’s opinion to being a family disgrace.

The last act of the great spectacle rushed on; and again the artist held her breath enthralled.  The gold on Skiddaw was passing into rose; and over the greenish blue of the lower sky, webs of crimson cirrhus spun themselves.  The stream ran fire; and far away the windows of a white farm blazed.  Lydia seized a spare sketching-block lying on the grass, and began to note down a few “passages” in the sky before her.

Suddenly a gust came straying down the valley.  It blew the press-cuttings which had dropped from her lap toward the stream.  One of them fell in, the others, long flapping things, hung caught in a tuft of grass.  Lydia sprang up, with an exclamation of annoyance, and went to the rescue.  Dear, dear!—­the longest and best notice, which spoke of her work as “agreeable and scholarly, showing, at tunes, more than a touch of high talent”—­was quietly floating away.  She must get it back.  Her mother had not yet read it—­not yet purred over it.  And it was most desirable she should read it, so as to get rid thereby of any lingering doubt about the horrid school and its horrid proposal.

But alack! the slip of newspaper was already out of reach, speeded by a tiny eddy toward a miniature rapid in the middle of the beck.  Lydia, clinging with one hand to a stump of willow, caught up a stick lying on the bank with the other, and, hanging over the stream, tried to head back the truant.  All that happened was that her foot slipping on a pebble went flop into the shallow water, and part of her dress followed it.