Babie went skipping about in the silvery flood of light, quite wild with delight as they came out on the heath, and, darting up to Mr. Ogilvie, asked if now he did not think they might really see a fairy.

“Perhaps I do,” he said.

“Oh where, where, show me?”

“Ah! you’re the one that can’t see her.”

“What, not if I did my eyes with that Euphrasia and Verbena officinalis?” catching tight hold of his hand, as a bright red light went rapidly moving in a straight line in the valley beneath their feet.

“Robin Goodfellow,” said Mr. Hughes, overhearing her, and immediately began to sing—-

          “I know a bank"—-

Then the curate, as he finished, began to sing some other appropriate song, and Nita Ray and others joined in.  It was very pretty, very charming in the moonlight, very like “Midsummer Night’s Dream;” but Mary Ogilvie, who was a good way behind, felt a start of dismay as the clear notes pealed back to her.  She longed to suggest a little expediency; but she was impeded; for poor Miss Ray, entirely unused to long country walks and nocturnal expeditions, and further tormented by tight boots, was panting up the hill far in the rear, half-frightened, and a good deal distressed, and could not, for very humanity’s sake, be left behind.

“And after all,” thought Mary, as peals of the boys’ merry laughter came to her, and then again echoes of “spotted snakes with double tongue” awoke the night echoes; “this is such a solitary place that it cannot signify, if they will only have the sense to stop when we get into the roads.”

But they hadn’t.  Mary heard a chorus from “Der Freischutz,” beginning just as she was dragging her companion over a stile, which had been formidable enough by day, but was ten times worse in the confusing shadows.  That brought them into a lane darkened by its high hedges, where there was nothing for it but to let Miss Ray tightly grapple her arm, while the songs came further and further on the wind, and Mary felt the conviction that middle-aged spinsters must reckon on being forgotten, and left behind alike by brothers, sisters, and friends.

Nor did they come up with the party till they found them waiting in the road, close to the Rays’ lodgings, having evidently just missed them, for Mr. Ogilvie and the clergyman were turning back to look for them when they were gladly hailed, half apologised to, half laughed at by a babel of voices, among which Nita’s was the loudest, informing her sister that she had lost the best bit of all, for just at the turn of the lane there had come on them Babie’s fiery-eyed monster, which had “burst on the path,” when they were in mid song, flashing over them, and revealing, first a horse, and then a brougham, wherein there sat the august forms of Colonel and Mrs. Brownlow, going home from a state dinner, the lady’s very marabouts quivering with horror.

Mary stepped up to Nita, and gave her a sharp, severe grasp.