This explanation was intended mainly as a quiet snub to Rachel. In the life at Borrowness, nothing tried Mona more sorely than the way in which her cousin truckled to every one whom she considered her social superior; and it was almost unavoidable that Mona herself should be driven to the opposite extreme in her morbid resolution that no one should consider her guilty of the same meanness. "I don't suppose for a moment that those girls would bow to Rachel in the streets of St Rules," she thought. "Why can she not be content to look upon them as customers and nothing more?" Poor Mona! She was certainly learning something of the seamiest side of the "wide, puzzling subject of compromise." Hitherto she had been responsible for herself alone, and so had lived simply and frankly; but now a thousand petty considerations were forced upon her in spite of herself, because she felt responsible for her cousin too. "Well, they do say the Cooksons are conceited and stiff," said Rachel, "but they're always pleasant enough to me." She found considerable satisfaction afterwards, however, in detailing to one of her friends how Mona had taken the bull by the horns, and had attributed the stiffness on which the Cooksons so prided themselves to simple want of manners. She felt as the people did in Hans Andersen's story when the first voice had found courage to say, "But he has got nothing on!" and she never again absolutely grovelled before the Cooksons. CHAPTER XV. THE BOTANISTS. Immediately after breakfast the next morning, Mona slung her vasculum over her shoulder, strapped a business-like spud round her waist, tucked a well-worn _Hooker_ under her arm, and set off at a good brisk pace. Contrary to all expectations, the rain still held off; and, as physical exercise brought the blood to her face, the clouds of her depression rolled away like mountain mists in the sunshine. She kept to the highroad for the first few miles, and then, when she was well past the haunts of men, struck on to the glorious, undulating, sandy dunes. Botanising was not very easy work now, for most of the plants were in fruit, and sometimes not even the youngest member of an inflorescence persisted, as a pale stray floret, to proclaim the pedigree of its family. But Mona was no tyro in the work, and her vasculum filled up steadily. Moreover, she was not disposed to quarrel with anything to-day, and when she reached the extreme easterly point of the county, and stood all alone at the water's edge, she felt the same sense of exultation and proprietorship that she had experienced on the wild pack-horse track above the Nærodal.