Lady Bell, though she had sufficient caution to keep her narratives within bounds, repaid Master Charles’s confidences by fine stories out of her short life with the players, out of the plays she had seen acted, and the few books which she had read. She took his advice seriously on the feather trimmings which she was manufacturing for Miss Kingscote’s furbelows, whether the turkeys’ feathers did not “come in vastly pretty as a silver grey after the golden brown of the pheasants’ feathers?” With a little pressing she sang to him, as an appropriate echo of his military aspirations, “Over the hills and far away;” she suffered him to escort her—to be sure Miss Kingscote was generally with her—when he overtook her on these country roads, which, in the shortening winter days, were not only barely surmountable in their mud and mire, but which were frequently forbidden to unattended women in the end of the last century. In short, Master Charles and Miss Barlowe were gliding fast into an innocent, inconsiderate, highly perilous intimacy, which was almost inevitable between the pair shut up together and shut out from the world. Young men were scarce about Lumley, and this young man was popular among the neighbours who had rescued him. Master Charles was freely welcome, where Miss Kingscote was merely tolerated and laughed at, in most of the country houses, and in the best town houses of Lumley. He could go a-visiting, if he chose, four evenings out of the seven. Naturally it was otherwise with Miss Kingscote’s companion. But all at once Lady Bell had her eyes opened to the precipice on the edge of which she was unwarily walking. In the first place Miss Kingscote’s manner changed. Her boisterous good humour and rough hospitality gave way to a halting glumness and an absolute rudeness. Her easiness grew uneasy, and testified itself in a kind of alarmed, reproachful indulgence to the follies of mankind, as distinct from, and preyed upon by, those of womankind. There were “creeturs,” Miss Kingscote declared emphatically, who stole into honourable houses and plotted against their credit. Miss Kingscote seemed to become morbidly concerned with these “creeturs,” vain peacocks, serpents in disguise, who aimed at occupying the seats of their betters, but would never reach those seats, instead would “sup” sorrow and disgrace, as the just punishment of their scandalous lightness of head and unwarrantable ambition. “But you would never be such a pagan, Miss,” Miss Kingscote would protest relentingly, not without a warning in the relenting, “you’ve been taken in and had the warmest corner here, as if you had been my sister, indeed—though, Lud! no sister of mine—a Kingscote of Nutfield, would have gone into service, rather starve, or live on the hards, as I have lived many and many’s the day.”