ould be awful if it tore though.... All
right, I'll risk it, but you'll all have to simply lug me over the
stiles. Fancy if I stuck in one all night!" Her laugh, husky as her
voice, gurgled out, and Mr. Eliot looked up from the packet of books he
was sorting at the end of the room.

"Hilaria!" he said, half sharply, half plaintively. She swung round at
him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the
movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back
for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid.

"Yes, Papa, I am ready. Can't you find all your right books?" And with
this adroit carrying of the war into enemy's country she deflected Mr.
Eliot's interest back upon himself, at no time a difficult task.

A few minutes later, having stopped to spend her week's
pocket-money--only threepence--on a paper twist full of jumbles, she
might have been seen going in the direction of home, walking, for her,
sedately, and looking very lady-like with the important bulk of the
crinoline swelling out the mantle that made all women, from behind, seem
at least fifty. A few people who saw her said to themselves that
Eliot's maid seemed to be growing up at last, but they did not see her
when, arrived at the stile she would have passed severely by had she
been going home, she flung her shoebag over it and, boldly tilting up
the cumbrous hoops, scrambled over it herself, with a flashing display
of frilled cambric trousers and white legs terminating in kid boots.

CHAPTER XI

THE PLACE ON THE MOOR

The nearest way to the hollow on the moor that Hilaria had made her own
was a tiny track so overgrown with brambles and gorse as hardly to be
worthy the name, and on this particular evening, out of care for her
strange garb, she took a path which curved with some semblance of
smoothness in a wider arc. Thus Ishmael and Killigrew, who had got away
in advance of the others of the "Ring," came to the hollow before her
and, climbing up behind it, flung themselves on a boulder where they
could watch all approaches. It was a wonderful place, that which
Hilaria's feminine instinct for the right atmosphere had led her to
choose. The moor sloped slightly for a mile or so below it, and it was
not so much a genuine hollow as made to seem like one by the semi-circle
of huge boulders that backed it. Set below and almost within them, the
curving ground showed a more vivid green than the rest of the moor, as