After luncheon Jessie, who was always energetic, suggested a walk.
The threatened bad weather had not come: it was a greyish afternoon, sunless but mild.
"If we walk towards St. Nectan's Kieve, we may meet the shooters," said Christabel. "That is a great place for woodcock."
"That will be delicious!" exclaimed Dopsy. "I worship St. Nectan's Kieve. Such a lovely ferny, rocky, wild, watery spot." And away she and her sister skipped, to put on the brown toques, and to refresh themselves with a powder puff.
They started for their ramble with Randie, and a favourite Clumber spaniel, degraded from his proud position as a sporting dog, to the ignoble luxury of a house pet, on account of an incorrigible desultoriness in his conduct with birds.
These affectionate creatures frisked round Christabel, while Miss Vandeleur and her sister seemed almost as friskily to surround Mr. Hamleigh with their South Belgravian blandishments.
"You look as if you were not very strong," hazarded Dopsy, sympathetically. "Are you not afraid of a long walk?"
"Not at all; I never feel better than when walking on these hills," answered Angus. "It is almost my native air, you see. I came here to get a stock of rude health before I go to winter in the South."
"And you are really going to be abroad all the winter?" sighed Dopsy, as if she would have said, "How shall I bear my life in your absence."
"Yes, it is five years since I spent a winter in England. I hold my life on that condition. I am never to know the luxury of a London fog, or see a Drury Lane pantomime, or skate upon the Serpentine. A case of real distress, is it not?"
"Very sad--for your friends," said Dopsy; "but I can quite imagine that you love the sunny South. How I long to see the Mediterranean--the mountains--the pine-trees--the border-land of Italy."
"No doubt you will go there some day--and be disappointed. People generally are when they indulge in day-dreams about a place."
"My dreams will always be dreams," answered Dopsy, with a profound sigh: "we are not rich enough to travel."
Christabel walked on in front with Jessie and the dogs. Mr. Hamleigh was longing to be by her side--to talk as they had talked of old--of a thousand things which could be safely discussed without any personal feeling. They had so many sympathies, so many ideas in common. All the world of sense and sentiment was theirs wherein to range at will. But Dopsy and Mopsy stuck to him like burs; plying him with idle questions, and stereotyped remarks, looking at him with languishing eyes.