“We shall be delighted if we can be of any use,” said Caerleon. “Do I understand that you would like us to meet Mademoiselle O’Malachy and bring her home? We were intending to spend the morning in the mountains, so that we shall not even need to change our plans.” “Monsieur is too good,” returned Madame O’Malachy. “I am desolated to be obliged to incommode him in this way, but my daughter has always lived in the country with her godmother, and knows nothing of the dangers which beset a young girl alone.” “Still, madame,” put in Cyril, “one can have nothing but admiration for the philanthropic instinct which has prompted mademoiselle to set out by herself to relieve a sick girl.” “You are too amiable, monsieur,” said madame. “My daughter is _dévote_, what you call ‘religious,’ and this characteristic makes a great deal of trouble for herself and for other people. But behold me only half-dressed!” and madame became suddenly aware that her abundant dark hair, scarcely yet tinged with grey, was coiled negligently in a loose knot on her neck; “pardon me, gentlemen, and remember my anxiety. Pray scold my daughter well when you find her. _Au revoir_!” and she retreated up-stairs. “Pleasant woman, Madame O’Malachy,” Caerleon remarked to Cyril when they had obtained directions from the landlord as to the exact situation of the huntsman’s cottage, and had started on their walk, “but I can’t quite make her out.” “Can’t you?” said Cyril. “I can. I’ve met too many of her before.” “She seemed so very anxious and excited,” went on Caerleon, pursuing his own train of thought, “and yet she doesn’t appear to care much for her daughter.” “Not a scrap!” said Cyril, emphatically. “Rather hates her than otherwise, I should say, from her tone. Fact is, either she particularly wants the hotel to herself to-day, or she wishes to throw one of us, presumably you, into the society of the young lady. Well, forewarned is forearmed.” “But it couldn’t have been all humbug. She wouldn’t have shown up in that costume if she hadn’t been really anxious.” “That costume!” said Cyril. “I’m as sure as that I’m here that every hair of that coil was arranged with an eye to its effect on us.” “But she came down in a dressing-gown.” “Yes, but what kind of dressing-gown? When a Scythian lady, and still more a Sarmatian,--and there’s a good deal more of the Sarmatian than the Scythian about our fair friend,--shows up in a dressing-gown, you may be pretty sure that it’s a court-dress rather differently made. Madame knows how to dress her part to the letter.” Caerleon only grunted in answer to this, and they went on in silence for some time. The path was steep, and Cyril found that climbing took all the breath he had to spare. “How much farther now to the top?” he asked at last, when they reached a sheltered nook in the hillside where a few pine-trees nestled. “A good two miles yet,” said Caerleon, looking back on the way they had come.