At this moment the companion proposed for Jasmine floated into the room. Miss Crossfield was so thin, her movements and gestures were so indeterminate, and her arms wandered so much upon the air, that indoors she suggested a daddy-longlegs on a window-pane, and out of doors a daddy-longlegs floating across an upland pasture in autumn. It was perhaps this extreme attenuation that gave her subservience a kind of spirituality; with so little flesh to clog her good will, she was almost literally a familiar spirit. She materialized like one of those obedient genies in the Arabian Nights whenever Lady Grant rang the bell, and she endowed that ring with as much magic as if it had been the golden ring of Abanazar. "Edith," said Lady Grant magnanimously, "I am writing my own letters this morning to give you the opportunity of taking Jasmine for a little walk. You had better take Spot with you--on the lead, of course." That at any rate would tie Cousin Edith to earth, Jasmine thought, for Spot was so fat and so porcine that he was unlikely to run away and carry Cousin Edith with him in a Gadarene rush down the face of the cliff. Yes, with Spot to detain her, not much could happen to Cousin Edith. But Jasmine was wrong. Spot had a fetish: the sensation of twigs or leaves faintly tickling his back gave him such exquisite pleasure that to secure it he would use the cunning of a morphinomaniac in pursuit of his drug. He would put back his ears and creep very slowly under the lower branches of a shrub, so that Cousin Edith, who in her affection for the family felt bound to indulge the dog to the whole length of his lead and even further, was lured after him deep into the chosen bush, so that finally, immaterial as she was, she was herself entangled in the upper branches. "I think I'm getting rather scratched," she would cry helplessly to Jasmine, who would have to come to the rescue with a sharp tug at Spot's lead. This used to give such a shock to the bloated fox-terrier that, torn from his sensation of being scratched by canine houris, he would choke, while Cousin Edith, dancing feebly on the still autumn air, would beg Jasmine never again to be so rough with him. The music of the Spa band grew louder while they were descending the winding paths of the cliff, until at last it burst upon Jasmine with the full force of an operatic finale and gave a throb of life to her hitherto lifeless morning. The music stopped before they reached the last curve of the descent, where they paused a moment to watch the movement of the daedal throng, above which parasols floated like great butterflies. From the sands beyond, above the chattering, came up the sound of children's laughter, and beyond that the pale blue winking sea was fused with the sky in the silver haze of August so that the furthest ships were sailing in the clouds.