hundred feet below. This made her slightly giddy and the people down
there had too much the appearance of pigmies with legs growing from
their necks, going about perfectly unimportant business with a great
deal of fuss. It was pleasanter to see these country people in their
carts, school-girls with plaits down their backs, rosy children in
perambulators and an exceedingly handsome man on a fine black horse, a
fair man, bronzed like a soldier, riding as though he had done it all
his life.

She looked at him with admiration for his looks and envy for his
possessions, for that horse, that somewhat sulky ease. And it was
quite possible that he was an acquaintance of her aunts! She laughed
away her awed astonishment. Why, her own father had been such as he,
though she had never seen him on a horse. She had, after all, to
adjust her views a little, to remember that she was a Mallett, a
member of an honoured Radstowe family, the granddaughter of a General,
the daughter of a gentleman, though a scamp. She was ashamed of the
something approaching reverence with which she had looked at the man
on the horse, but she was also ashamed of her shame; in fact, to be
ashamed at all was, she felt, a degradation, and she cast the feeling
from her.

Here was not only a new world but a new life, a new starting point;
she must be equal to the place, the opportunity and the occasion; she
was, she told herself, equal to them all.

In this self-confident mood she returned to Nelson Lodge and found
Caroline, in a different frock, seated behind the tea-table and in the
act of putting the tea into the pot.