’Am I to stop when I get to the bottom?—­most people like to do it before,’ she said.

’You must.  Come a little lower down, if you please.  Take Mr. Falkirk’s hand as soon as you reach footing.’

It was no place for ceremony, neither could she help it.  As she spoke, he took the young lady in both hands as if she had been a parcel, and swung her lightly and firmly, though it must have been with the exercise of great strength, down to a rocky cleft which her feet could reach and from which Mr. Falkirk’s hand could reach her.  Only then did Mr. Rollo’s hand release her; and then he bounded down himself like a cat.  Once more, very nearly the same operation had to be gone through; then a few plunging and scrambling steps placed them in a clear path, and the sound of the waters of the fall told them which way to take.  With that, Rollo lifted his hat again gravely and fell back behind the others.  Wrapping herself in her mood as if it had been a veil, Wych Hazel likewise bent her head—­it might have been to both gentlemen; but then she sped forward at a rate which she knew one could not and the other would not follow, and disappeared among the leaves like a frightened partridge.

What was she like when they reached the party on the height?  With no token of her adventures but the pink wreath round her hat and the pink flush under it, Miss Hazel sat there a la reine; Mr. Kingsland at her feet, a circle of standing admirers on all sides; her own immediate attention concentrated on a thorn in one of her wee fingers.  Less speedily Mr. Falkirk had followed her and now stood at the back of the group, silent and undemonstrative.  Rollo had gone another way and was not any longer of the party.

CHAPTER VII.

SMOKE.

To Chickaree by the stage was a two-days’ journey.  The first day presented nothing remarkable.  Rollo was their only fellow traveller whom they knew; and he did nothing to lighten the tedium of the way, beyond the ordinary courtesies.  And after the first few hours the scenery had little to attract.  The country became an ordinary farming district, with no distinctive features.  Not that there be not sweet things to interest in such a landscape, for a mind free enough and eyes unspoiled.  There are tints of colouring in a flat pasture field, to feed the eye that can find them; there are forms and shadows in a rolling arable country, sweet and changing and satisfying.  There are effects in tufts of spared woodland, and colours in wild vegetation, and in the upturned brown and umber of fields of ploughed earth, and in the grey lichened rocks and the clear tints of their broken edges.  There are the associations and indications of human life, too; tokens of thrift and of poverty, of weary toil and of well-to-do activity.  Where the ploughs go, and the ploughmen; where the cattle are driven afield; where the farmyards tell how they are housed and kept; where the women sit