Naturally I was upset. Every time Edelgard is neglectful or forgetful she recedes about a year in my esteem. It takes her a year of attentiveness and diligence to regain that point in my affection on which she previously stood. She knew this, and used to be careful to try to keep proper pace, if I may so express it, with my love, and at the date at which I have arrived in the narrative had not yet given up trying, so that when by shouting I had made Mrs. Menzies-Legh understand that the Elsa was to be stopped Edelgard hurried back to inquire what was wrong, and was properly distressed when she saw the result of her negligence. Well, repentance may be a good thing, but our ox-tongue was gone forever; before he could be stopped the Ailsa’s horse, following close behind, had placed his huge hoof on it and it became pulp. “How sad,” said Frau von Eckthum gazing upon this ruin. “But so nice of you, dear Baroness, to think of it. It might just have saved us all from starvation.” “Well, it can’t now,” said one of the young men; and he took it on the point of his stick and cast it into the ditch. Edelgard began silently to pick up the scattered biscuits. Immediately both the young men darted forward to do it for her with a sudden awakening to energy that seemed very odd in persons who slouched along with their hands in their pockets. It made me wonder whether perhaps they thought her younger than she was. As we resumed our march, I came to the conclusion that this must be so, for such activity of assistance would otherwise be unnatural, and I resolved to take the earliest opportunity of bringing the conversation round to birthdays and then carelessly mentioning that my wife’s next one would be her thirtieth. In this department of all others I am not the man to allow buds to go unnipped. We had not been travelling ten minutes before we came to a stony turning up to the right which old James, who was a native of those parts, said was the entrance to the common. It seemed strange to camp almost within a stone’s throw of our starting-place, but the rain was at that moment pelting down on our defenceless heads, and people hurrying to their snug homes stopped in spite of it to look at us with a wondering pity, so that we all wished to get off the road as soon as possible and into the privacy of furze bushes. The lane was in no sense a hill: it was a gentle incline, almost immediately reaching flat ground; but it was soft and stony, and the Ilsa’s horse, after dragging his caravan for a few yards up it, could get no farther, and when Menzies-Legh put the roller behind the back wheel to prevent the Ilsa’s returning thither from whence it had just come the chain of the roller snapped, the roller, released, rolled away, and the Ilsa began to move backward on top of the Elsa, which in its turn began to move backward on top of the Ailsa, which in its turn began to move backward across the road in the direction of the ditch.