“All of them, of course.  Killigrew and Moss minor and the Polkinghornes and Carminow—­not Doughty; I didn’t like him last time—­I don’t know why ...”  She broke off and bent forward, her tones took on a thrill; “I’ve got it,” she announced.

“The new number of ‘The Woman in White’?  Oh, Hilaria!...”

“It wasn’t easy, I can tell you, and we shall have to hurry with it, but it’s in my shoe-bag now.”

“Must you go home and change?  It’ll give us so little time.  It’s dark at eight, and we have to be in to supper then, anyway.”

Hilaria hesitated, still slightly leaning forward like a great full-petalled blossom heavy with approaching night.

“I suppose I could manage....  Papa goes on to give a French lesson before he comes home....  It would be awful if it tore though....  All right, I’ll risk it, but you’ll all have to simply lug me over the stiles.  Fancy if I stuck in one all night!” Her laugh, husky as her voice, gurgled out, and Mr. Eliot looked up from the packet of books he was sorting at the end of the room.

“Hilaria!” he said, half sharply, half plaintively.  She swung round at him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid.

“Yes, Papa, I am ready.  Can’t you find all your right books?” And with this adroit carrying of the war into enemy’s country she deflected Mr. Eliot’s interest back upon himself, at no time a difficult task.

A few minutes later, having stopped to spend her week’s pocket-money—­only threepence—­on a paper twist full of jumbles, she might have been seen going in the direction of home, walking, for her, sedately, and looking very lady-like with the important bulk of the crinoline swelling out the mantle that made all women, from behind, seem at least fifty.  A few people who saw her said to themselves that Eliot’s maid seemed to be growing up at last, but they did not see her when, arrived at the stile she would have passed severely by had she been going home, she flung her shoebag over it and, boldly tilting up the cumbrous hoops, scrambled over it herself, with a flashing display of frilled cambric trousers and white legs terminating in kid boots.

CHAPTER XI

THE PLACE ON THE MOOR

The nearest way to the hollow on the moor that Hilaria had made her own was a tiny track so overgrown with brambles and gorse as hardly to be worthy the name, and on this particular evening, out of care for her strange garb, she took a path which curved with some semblance of smoothness in a wider arc.  Thus Ishmael and Killigrew, who had got away in advance of the others of the “Ring,” came to the hollow before her and, climbing up behind it, flung themselves on a boulder where they could watch all approaches.  It was a wonderful place, that which