inous name--lay,
and what tracks led thereto. Thither she would ride on the next hunting
day and confront the girl, settle the matter with her husband, and put
an end to his shameful intrigue at once.

She had not very long to wait, for in the week after the Meet was
advertised at the Craig, which was, she knew, some few miles west of The
Bower, overlooking the Black Burn.

Early in the afternoon she rode out 'to meet her husband,' as she told
the groom, when she mounted, but in reality to catch him, if she could,
with the girl on his way back with her to her home.

She mounted up the fell to the southward on whose crest the track showed
like a wisp of hay left by the reaper. Gaining the top she paused and
looked athwart the mighty view outstretched before her. To her husband
she knew it was as Swinburne's 'great glad land that knows not bourne
nor bound,' but to herself it was a desert.

Below her the barren moorlands spread away--'harvestless as ocean'--till
they met the whitelands of the further fells, where wandering sheep
sought their living. On the sky's verge ran the line of Rome's great
barrier of wall. This seemed to increase the sense of infinity already
given by the landscape, for the mighty wall was now but a wreck upon
Time's shore.

In the mid way 'twixt moor and whiteland lay The Bower. Mrs. Chesters
rode on down towards the farmhouse, where it stood eminent upon a knoll
beyond the burn, covered with ivy, and sheltered by ash trees from the
blasts of the west wind.

She had marked a clump of rowans and geans a hundred yards or so from
the burn where she determined to stop her horse and reconnoitre before
going up to the farm itself.

Concealing herself as best she could within the small copse she noticed
that the track descended to where usually a ford was discoverable. She
could note horses' hoofs on the bank top, but the cart road to the farm
ran on the farther side of the burn, winding in and out of the rolling
pasture. To the right hand fifty yards away, a light wooden bridge with
hand-rail leapt from rock to rock above the foaming water.

Boiling amidst the rocky chasm it poured an amber flood across the ford
below.

A bold rider might have perhaps leaped his horse across; that might
possibly have been safer than to walk a horse through where a stumble
might mean doom to both.

No, Mrs. Chesters decided; if she went up to the farm she would have to
dismount and walk across the little bri