Thus, when Mrs. Chesters pressed on her husband the desirability of entering Parliament, he protested that he had only seven skins; and when she wished to pay a round of visits to distinguished people he maintained that they ought to reside at Chesters Castle for a while. She yielded, but her husband's castle completed her disillusion. She had thought of it as a social _point d'appui_--she found it in her own words 'a gloomy shooting barrack.' But her husband loved it, and rejoiced in the opportunity of renewing his youth with the salmon-fishing, the grouse and blackcock driving, and the great days of hunting on the wide moorlands of the Border, over which his ancestors in bygone centuries had ridden day and night on raid and foray. Mrs. Chesters could ride, had enjoyed the social advantages of the Quorn and Pytchley, but she hated what she called disdainfully, 'bogtrotting with Picts and Scots.' She had not yet become indifferent to her husband, but she was terribly disappointed with his total lack of ambition. Now that the salmon-fishing was over and the covers shot, she pined for town, but her husband begged for a few more weeks of hunting first. What joy could he find in the long days out on the barren fells? She realised that he had become indifferent to her, though his charm of manner to herself was externally the same. She grew suspicious, if not jealous. Then one day an anonymous letter came to her--signed 'Your Well-Wisher,' which corroborated her own uneasy thoughts--suggesting coarsely that her husband was chasing a _vixen_--not a fox. No name was actually mentioned, but Mrs. Chesters realised at once who 'the woman' was. She remembered noticing a young girl at an early meet held at the castle, who had attracted her attention by her air of breeding, beauty, and faultless seat on her mare. She had learnt that the girl was the daughter of an old yeoman farmer who lived on his farm, quaintly called 'The Bower,' far outbye on the moorland beside the Blackburn Lynn. She had mentioned the matter to her husband, and asked him where the girl had acquired her good looks and her breeding. He had replied--and she thought now--with a slight uneasiness of manner, that Miss Todd came of a 'grayne' that had lived on the Border before ever the Normans came into the land, that by intermarrying with a few other ancient yeomen families a distinct and natural aristocratic type had resulted. 'Clean living, fresh air, and as much hunting as possible,' have all assisted. Nature also has assimilated the lines of her children's faces to the classical lines wind-chiselled of her great fells. Their oval faces, blue eyes, fair hair, and clean-chiselled features are her endowment.