ndid fortune which
his grandmother, the dowager Countess, had nursed so judiciously during
his long minority. Maulevrier and Mary had always been what the young
man called 'no end of chums.'

He called her his own brown-eyed Molly, much to the annoyance of Lady
Maulevrier and Lesbia; and Mary's life was all gladness when Maulevrier
was at Fellside. She devoted herself wholly to his amusements, rode and
drove with him, followed on her pony when he went otter hunting, and
very often abandoned the pony to the care of some stray mountain youth
in order to join the hunters, and go leaping from stone to stone on the
margin of the stream, and occasionally, in moments of wild excitement,
when the hounds were in full cry, splashing in and out of the water,
like a naiad in a neat little hunting-habit.

Mary looked after Maulevrier's stable when he was away, and had supreme
command of a kennel of fox-terriers which cost her brother more money
than the Countess would have cared to know; for in the wide area of Lady
Maulevrier's ambition there was no room for two hundred guinea
fox-terriers, were they never so perfect.

Altogether Mary's life was a different life when her brother was at
home; and in his absence the best part of her days were spent in
thinking about him and fulfilling the duties of her position as his
representative in stable and kennel, and among certain rustics in the
district, chiefly of the sporting type, who were Maulevrier's chosen
allies or _proteges_.

Never, perhaps, had two girls of patrician lineage lived a more secluded
life than Lady Maulevrier's granddaughters. They had known no pleasures
beyond the narrow sphere of home and home friends. They had never
travelled--they had seen hardly anything of the outside world. They had
never been to London or Paris, or to any city larger than York; and
their visits to that centre of dissipation had been of the briefest, a
mere flash of mild gaiety, a horticultural show or an oratorio, and back
by express train, closely guarded by governess and footmen, to Fellside.
In the autumn, when the leaves were falling in the wooded grounds of
Fellside, the young ladies were sent, still under guardianship of
governesses and footmen, to some quiet seaside resort between Alnwick
and Edinburgh, where Mary lived the wild free life she loved, roaming
about the beach, boating, shrimping, seaweed-gathering, making hard work
for the governesses and footmen who had been sent in ch