As soon, however, as she heard that Roxmouth had actually left England, she made haste to return at once to the home she had now learned to love with a deep and clinging affection, and she had timed her reappearance purposely for the first meet of the hunting season.  She would show herself, so she resolved, as a free and independent woman to all the county,—­and if people had gossiped about her, or were prone to gossip, they would soon find out the error of their ways.  Hence the ‘creation’ of the becoming violet velvet riding-dress, copied from the picture of her ancestress in Abbot’s Manor gallery.  She had determined to make an ‘effective’ entrance on the field,—­to look as pretty and picturesque as she possibly could, and to show that she was herself and nobody else, bound to no authority save her own.

In this purely feminine ambition she certainly accomplished her end.  She was the centre of attraction,—­all the members of the Riversford Hunt dispersed round and about her in Hear or distant groups, discussed her in low tones, even while watching the working of the pack, and scanning every yard of open ground for the first sign of a fox.  Gradually the crowd of horses and riders increased,—­men from the county-town itself, farmers from the more outlying parts of the neighbourhood, and some of the Badsworth Hall tenantry, having arrived too late at Ittlethwaite Park for the actual meet, now came hurriedly galloping up, and among these last was Oliver Leach.  It was the first time Maryllia had seen her dismissed agent since her rescue of the Five Sister beeches, and she had thought of him so little that she would not have recognised him now had not his horse, a vicious-looking restive creature, started plunging close to her own hunter ‘Cleopatra,’ and caused that spirited animal to rear almost upright on her haunches.  In the act of reining the mare out of his way she looked at him, while he, in his turn stared full at her in evident astonishment.  As he appeared gradually to recognise her identity, his face, always livid, grew more deeply sallow of hue, and an ugly grin made a gargoyle of his mouth and eyes.  She, as soon as she recollected him, remembered at the same time the curse he had flung at her—­’a May curse,’ she thought to herself with a superstitious little shudder—­’and a May curse always begins to work in November, so the gossips say!’

Moved by an instinctive distrust and dislike of the man, she turned her back upon, him, and patting Cleopatra’s neck, cantered quickly ahead to join the rest of the field which was now moving towards another cover, while the hounds ran through some low thickets of brushwood and tangled bracken.