“An’ I wish he’d get the devil to do’s grooming for’n,” growled John.

“Aye; he’d hev a deal haimabler groom nor what he has now,” observed Dalton—­and the joke appeared to him so good that, being left alone upon the scene, he continued at intervals to take his pipe from his mouth in order to wink at an imaginary audience and shake luxuriously with a silent, ventral laughter, mentally rehearsing the dialogue from the beginning, that he might recite it with effect in the servants’ hall.

When Arthur went up to his dressing-room again after luncheon, it was inevitable that the debate he had had with himself there earlier in the day should flash across his mind; but it was impossible for him now to dwell on the remembrance—­impossible to recall the feelings and reflections which had been decisive with him then, any more than to recall the peculiar scent of the air that had freshened him when he first opened his window.  The desire to see Hetty had rushed back like an ill-stemmed current; he was amazed himself at the force with which this trivial fancy seemed to grasp him:  he was even rather tremulous as he brushed his hair—­pooh! it was riding in that break-neck way.  It was because he had made a serious affair of an idle matter, by thinking of it as if it were of any consequence.  He would amuse himself by seeing Hetty to-day, and get rid of the whole thing from his mind.  It was all Irwine’s fault.  “If Irwine had said nothing, I shouldn’t have thought half so much of Hetty as of Meg’s lameness.”  However, it was just the sort of day for lolling in the Hermitage, and he would go and finish Dr. Moore’s Zeluco there before dinner.  The Hermitage stood in Fir-tree Grove—­the way Hetty was sure to come in walking from the Hall Farm.  So nothing could be simpler and more natural:  meeting Hetty was a mere circumstance of his walk, not its object.

Arthur’s shadow flitted rather faster among the sturdy oaks of the Chase than might have been expected from the shadow of a tired man on a warm afternoon, and it was still scarcely four o’clock when he stood before the tall narrow gate leading into the delicious labyrinthine wood which skirted one side of the Chase, and which was called Fir-tree Grove, not because the firs were many, but because they were few.  It was a wood of beeches and limes, with here and there a light silver-stemmed birch—­just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs:  you see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping from behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their soft liquid laughter—­but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye, they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe that their voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost bough.  It was not a grove with measured grass or rolled gravel for you to tread upon, but with narrow, hollow-shaped, earthy paths, edged with faint dashes of delicate moss—­paths which look as if they were made by the free will of the trees and underwood, moving reverently aside to look at the tall queen of the white-footed nymphs.