“I thought you had all your woman-senses, Charlotte.  Bethink you of the garden walk last night.”

“We were talking all the time of the sweetbrier and hollyhocks,—­and things like that.”

“You might have talked of the days of the week or the multiplication-table:  one kind of words was just as good as another.  Any thing Steve said last night could have been spelled with four letters.”

“Four letters?”

“To be sure.  L-o-v-e.”

“You used to like Stephen.”

“I like all bright, honest, good lads; but when they want to make love to Miss Charlotte Sandal, they think one thing, and I think another.  There has been ill-luck with love-making between the Sandals and the Latriggs.  My brothers Launcie and Tom quarrelled about one of Barf Latrigg’s daughters, and mother lost them both through her.  There is no love-line between the two houses, or if there is nothing can make it run straight.  Don’t you try to, Charlotte; neither the dead nor the living will like it or have it.”

He intended then to tell her about Julius Sandal, but a look at her face checked him.  He had a wise perception about women; and he reflected that he had very seldom repented of speaking too little to them, but very often repented of speaking too much.  So he dropped Stephen, and dropped Julius; and began to talk about the fish in the becks and tarns, and the new breed of sheep he was trying in the lower “walks.”  Ere long they came into the rich valley of Furness; and he made her notice the difference between it and the vale of Esk and Duddon, with its dreary waste of sullen moss and unfruitful solitudes.

“Those old Cistercian monks that built Furness Abbey knew how to choose a bit of good land, Charlotte.  Eh?  What?”

“I suppose so.  What did they do with it?”

“Let it out.”

“I wonder who would want to come here seven hundred years ago.”

“You don’t know what you are saying, Charlotte.  There were great men here then, and great deeds doing.  King Stephen kept things very lively; and the Scots were always running over the Border for cattle and sheep, and any thing else they could lay their hands on.  And the monks had great flocks, so they rented their lands to companies of four fighting men; and one of the four was to be ready day and night to protect the sheep, and the Scots kept them busy.  Eh?  What?”

“The Musgraves and Armstrongs and Netherbys, I know,” and the cloud passed from her face; and to the clatter of her horse’s hoofs, she lilted merrily a stanza of an old border song:—­

    “The mountain sheep were sweeter,
       But the valley sheep were fatter;
     We therefore deemed it meeter
       To carry off the latter. 
     We made an expedition;
       We met a force, and quelled it;
     We took a strong position,
       And killed the men who held it.”

And the squire, who knew the effort it cost her, fell readily into her mood of forced gayety until the simulated feeling became a real one; and they entered Dalton neck and neck together, after a mile’s hard race.