So, for some nine months of the year, she held at her brother’s house her little feudatory court, and found, in the faithful homage of her squireens, a spring of content so untinged by jealousy, or the necessity of it, as that it seemed the very rejuvenating water of life. There, did she tire of poetry, she smiled upon music in a way to make it almost in tune with itself; did she fall out of touch with Handel, she sickened, as it were, of art, and painted her name with an elegant flourish on the bright margin of the sky; did she weary of Tom, she handed him over for decent burial in a homelier heart, and coquetted with Dick during the whole of a St. Martin’s summer. And for all she did there was the appropriate background of woods and freshets and frisking lambs, that seemed to justify her most erratic courses. For the trees changed month by month, and the freshets swelled to torrents, and the lambs frisked into mutton with fat wool and were shorn. Now, about the period of Mr. Tuke’s invasion of her fields of romance, she was in her state aurelian; and, bursting its shell, her butterfly fancy lighted on him. Never before had she happened upon so dear a flower for the engagement of her sensibilities. She tested him with her delicate antennæ, and found him full of a rough honey that charmed her palate exceedingly. He had thorns; but with her little nippers she could pinch the tips off these and make them harmless. She fell into a really parlous state, and seemed to learn her womanliness--though she was rising twenty-seven--in a single sweet hour. His image had dwelt with her ever since. It was with her now, as she stepped over the threshold of “Chatters” in her riding-habit. For she was for a canter with her brother; and secretly she hoped to come across _him_ in the course of it. Sir David was already in the saddle, and a groom held her horse. At the very moment she came forth, she heard her brother utter an exclamation, and saw a light bounding figure fling itself towards him and, catching at his saddle-bow, make some appeal to him with a frenzy of gesture. It was the girl Darda, as she saw--hoodless, flushed and dishevelled; and the lady looked on a little amazed, and with a fine attitude of scorn towards a creature who could so forego the ethics of her sex under the stimulus of excitement. “What is it, Davy?” she said, descending the steps, and coldly ignoring the wild-eyed young woman, who as indifferently returned her contempt with utter disregard of her presence. Sir David looked perplexed and troubled. “Hush!” he said to the girl, who still pleaded with him in a low clamour of words. Darda fell silent; but she looked round on Miss Royston with lowered brows and her white teeth set doggedly. “Rabbit it!” cried the little baronet in perturbation. “I’m foundered, Angel. What shall I do?” “We are going for a ride, are we not?”