* * * * *

While she sketched and thought thus, the shadows grew longer, and the sun low.  And then she perceived a movement in the gorge.  One of the trees forming the curtain across it began to wave strangely:  it went further to one side, and fell.  Where the tree had stood was now a rent in the foliage, and through the narrow rent could be seen the distant sea.

Ethelberta uttered a soft exclamation.  It was not caused by the surprise she had felt, nor by the intrinsic interest of the sight, nor by want of comprehension.  It was a sudden realization of vague things hitherto dreamed of from a distance only—­a sense of novel power put into her hands without request or expectation.  A landscape was to be altered to suit her whim.  She had in her lifetime moved essentially larger mountains, but they had seemed of far less splendid material than this; for it was the nature of the gratification rather than its magnitude which enchanted the fancy of a woman whose poetry, in spite of her necessities, was hardly yet extinguished.  But there was something more, with which poetry had little to do.  Whether the opinion of any pretty woman in England was of more weight with Lord Mountclere than memories of his boyhood, or whether that distinction was reserved for her alone; this was a point that she would have liked to know.

The enjoyment of power in a new element, an enjoyment somewhat resembling in kind that which is given by a first ride or swim, held Ethelberta to the spot, and she waited, but sketched no more.  Another tree-top swayed and vanished as before, and the slit of sea was larger still.  Her mind and eye were so occupied with this matter that, sitting in her nook, she did not observe a thin young man, his boots white with the dust of a long journey on foot, who arrived at the castle by the valley-road from Knollsea.  He looked awhile at the ruin, and, skirting its flank instead of entering by the great gateway, climbed up the scarp and walked in through a breach.  After standing for a moment among the walls, now silent and apparently empty, with a disappointed look he descended the slope, and proceeded along on his way.

Ethelberta, who was in quite another part of the castle, saw the black spot diminishing to the size of a fly as he receded along the dusty road, and soon after she descended on the other side, where she remounted the ass, and ambled homeward as she had come, in no bright mood.  What, seeing the precariousness of her state, was the day’s triumph worth after all, unless, before her beauty abated, she could ensure her position against the attacks of chance?

      ’To be thus is nothing;
   But to be safely thus.’

—­she said it more than once on her journey that day.

On entering the sitting-room of their cot up the hill she found it empty, and from a change perceptible in the position of small articles of furniture, something unusual seemed to have taken place in her absence.  The dwelling being of that sort in which whatever goes on in one room is audible through all the rest, Picotee, who was upstairs, heard the arrival and came down.  Picotee’s face was rosed over with the brilliance of some excitement.  ‘What do you think I have to tell you, Berta?’ she said.