‘Do you know it?’

‘If you suffer my guidance—­undoubtedly.’

’Ah!—­if.  In that case so do I. But I “suffered” so much on the last occasion—­and Dr. Maryland has left the Mountain.’

’I would not for the world be importunate!  Perhaps you will direct me if I shall inform any one of your hiding place—­or do you desire to have it remain such?’

‘Thank you,’ said Miss Hazel, framing the landscape in her pink wreath and gazing at it intently, ’I suppose there is not much danger.  But if you see Mr. Falkirk you may reveal to him my distressed condition.  He needs stimulus occasionally.’

Rollo lifted his hat with his usual Spanish courtesy; then disappeared, but not indeed by the way he had come.  He threw himself upon an outstanding oak branch, from which, lightly and lithely, as if he had been the red squirrel himself, he dropped to some place out of sight.  One or two bounds, rustling amid leaves and branches, and he had gone from hearing as well as from view.

Wych Hazel had time to meditate.  Doubtless she once more scanned the rocks by which inexplicably she had let herself down to her present position; but in vain, no strength or agility of hers, unaided, could avail to get up them again.  Indeed it was not easy to see how aid could mend the matter.  Miss Hazel left considering the question.  It was a wild place she was in, and wild things suited it; the very birds, unaccustomed to disturbance, hopped near her and eyed her out of their bright eyes.  If they could have given somewhat of their practical sageness to the human creature they were watching!  Wych Hazel had very little of it, and just then, in truth, would have chosen their wings instead.  She did not, even now, in their innocent, busy manners, read how much else they had that she lacked; though she looked at them and at all the other wild things.  The tree branches that stretched as they listed, no axe coming ever upon their freedom; the moss and lichens that flourished in luxuriant beds and pastures, not breathed on by even a naturalist’s breath; the rocks that they had clothed for ages, no one disturbing.  The very cloud shadows that now and then swept over the ravine and the hillside, meeting nothing less free than themselves, scarce anything less noiseless, seemed to assert the whole scene as Nature’s own.  Since the days of the red men nothing but cloud shadows had travelled there; the nineteenth century had made no entrance, no wood-cutter had lifted his axe in the forest; the mountain streams, that you might hear soft rushing in the distance, did not work but their own in their citadel of the hills.  Wych Hazel had time to consider it all, and to watch more than one shadow walk slowly from end to end of the long stretch of the mountain valley, before she heard anything else than the wild noise of leaf and water and bird.  At last there came something more definite, in the sounds of leaves and branches over her head; and then with certainly a little difficulty, Mr. Falkirk let himself down to her standing place.  To say that Mr. Falkirk looked in a gratified state of mind would be to strain the truth; though his thick eyebrows were unruffled.