On the contrary, she could not help rejoicing that she had left him and bondage behind, and that the world was before her. The sense of freedom and of a new life sent a certain glow and throb of elasticity through her veins. Lady Bell trudged on alongside the ragged hedges, and keeping by the posts which marked the king’s highway, in the broken, deeply-rutted road. She ceased to see any trace of the election, beyond a spurring messenger now and again. The few travellers were of an honest though homely description. The electioneering had done good for the moment, scoured the neighbouring country, and collected the stoutest beggars, the most rampageous tramps, into their dens in Peasmarsh. There was a rustic yeoman, mounted on his best cart-horse, with his sister behind him, clasping him round the capacious waist, trotting away to spend the evening in hunting the slipper and roasting hot cockles with some neighbours. There were farm-servants and labourers hieing home from their day’s work ere nightfall. These wayfarers glanced with a little wonder at Lady Bell, even in her ordinary scarlet habit, and her neckcloth, as a lady who ought to be on her horse, with her servant behind her, and who might be on foot and by herself as the result of an accident, or in consequence of keeping a private appointment. But these were worthy people who took their neighbours’ adventures coolly, and did not, when they were not accosted and asked to interfere, see themselves called on to forsake their proper business and pleasure for the sake of a third party, in an adventure which might be sorry enough. The country folks were much the same as those whom Lady Bell had stared at in the light of a novelty on the occasion of her journey from London to St. Bevis’s. It was not quite a year since then; Lady Bell was still only between fifteen and sixteen, an age, indeed, not very practical, and alternating between rashness and timidity. She walked on in the lengthening shadows and growing chilliness, not knowing whither she walked, only feeling that she was getting tired and footsore. She resisted, for a wonderful length of time, the perplexity and downcastness which stole over her, and took the place of her foolish satisfaction. But fatigue and uncertainty increased until they well-nigh overpowered her, and she was in danger of sinking down at any moment in utter exhaustion and consternation, weeping at the prospect of having to stay there all night, and of dying of cold, if she were not murdered by footpads. At last a country cart, on which a number of pieces of furniture, chests of drawers, and bookcases were piled, indicating the removal from one dwelling to another of some household of condition, came along, and drew up just after it had passed Lady Bell.