he woman is miserable at
last, and had better not have had him at all.'

'That applies still more to Lord Mountclere, to my thinking. I never saw
anything like the look of his eyes upon you.'

'O no, no--you understand nothing if you say that. But one thing be sure
of, there is no marriage likely to take place between myself and Mr.
Neigh. I have longed for a sound reason for disliking him, and now I
have got it. Well, we will talk no more of this--let us think of the
nice little pleasure we have in store--our stay at Knollsea. There we
will be as free as the wind. And when we are down there, I can drive
across to Corvsgate Castle if I wish to attend the Imperial Association
meeting, and nobody will know where I came from. Knollsea is not more
than five miles from the Castle, I think.'

Picotee was by this time beginning to yawn, and Ethelberta did not feel
nearly so wakeful as she had felt half-an-hour earlier. Tall and swarthy
columns of smoke were now soaring up from the kitchen chimneys around,
spreading horizontally when at a great height, and forming a roof of haze
which was turning the sun to a copper colour, and by degrees spoiling the
sweetness of the new atmosphere that had rolled in from the country
during the night, giving it the usual city smell. The resolve to make
this rising the beginning of a long and busy day, which should set them
beforehand with the rest of the world, weakened with their growing
weariness, and an impulse to lie down just for a quarter of an hour
before dressing, ended in a sound sleep that did not relinquish its hold
upon them till late in the forenoon.

31. KNOLLSEA--A LOFTY DOWN--A RUINED CASTLE

Knollsea was a seaside village lying snug within two headlands as between
a finger and thumb. Everybody in the parish who was not a boatman was a
quarrier, unless he were the gentleman who owned half the property and
had been a quarryman, or the other gentleman who owned the other half,
and had been to sea.

The knowledge of the inhabitants was of the same special sort as their
pursuits. The quarrymen in white fustian understood practical geology,
the laws and accidents of dips, faults, and cleavage, far better than the
ways of the world and mammon; the seafaring men in Guernsey frocks had a
clearer notion of Alexandria, Constantinople, the Cape, and the Indies
than of any inland town in their own country. This, for them, consisted
of a busy portion, the Channel,