This was a rough arrangement of stepping stones, which the painter had made for himself before he came there, by manipulating the loose boulders of the river bed a little. It constituted a short cut from the inn to his sketching place, and saved him a mile’s walk at least. He had taken good care to give the stream play between the rough piers of his bridge as it were, leaving enormous gaps and chasms, but still the river resented being interfered with, and altered the position of the stones and washed them away sometimes in the night, of malice prepense, as Mrs. Elles declared. She found plenty to do every day in replacing the stones that had been dislodged and adding new ones, and worked away merrily, thinking of Cincinnatus and his plough, and of the picture Dante began to paint for Beatrice, in this connection. “The very first time the river comes down,” Rivers prophesied, “all our work will have to be done over again. There will be no bridge left!” She could, of course, have shown herself a great deal more agile without her spectacles, which hampered her continually, but she had made a point of never removing them in sight of her fellow creatures, and only ventured to push them up over her brows when she was alone with only cows and squirrels for witnesses. She clung to them, as a saint might hug his cross or an anchorite his hair-shirt. They symbolized the purity of her intentions, they were her armour of honourable woman and loyal wife to Mortimer; her ticket-of-leave indeed, when she thought of him and all that he implied. She put the odious and tiresome things on every morning, as a knight endures his panoply or buckles on his shield of proof, and honourably continued to wander about in a cold, blue, local atmosphere of her own, aware only through her other senses of the glow of yellow light and hope that lay outside, besieging the frigid unreceptive discs of her self-imposed barrier in vain. “It is hateful, but it just saves the situation,” she would say to herself. “And it makes me free. I can say what I like and do what I like, so long as I don’t look what I like!” But, indeed, there were times when that last item of forbearance seemed the hardest item of all.