Of the sons, the younger, Percy, looked to be turning out not so well. Away at school, the boy was constantly causing trouble—the authorities repeatedly threatened to send him home. He had already been dismissed from Eton. Arthur, on the other hand, was a son in whom his parents could have confidence. As Richard had already discovered, the young heir was, if not the ideal of grace and intelligence, at least not snobbish, and willing to acknowledge others’ abilities.

The little lady that rode the great mare was at present their guest—as she often was, in intermittent fashion. She lived in the neighbourhood, but was more at Mortgrange than at home. One consequence of this was that, as would-be-clever Miss Malliver phrased it, the house was very much B. Wyldered. Nor was that the first house the little lady had bewildered, for she was indeed an importation from a new colony rather startling to sedate old England. Her father, a younger son, had unexpectedly succeeded to the family property a few miles from Mortgrange. He was supposed to have made a fortune in New Zealand, where Barbara was born and brought up. They had been home nearly two years, and she was almost eighteen. Absurd rumours were abroad concerning their wealth, but there were no great signs of wealth about the place. Wylder Hall was kept up, and its life went on in good style, but mainly because the old servants perpetuated the customs of the house.

The squire was said to have shared in some of the roughest phases of colonial life. Whether he was better or worse for falling in love with the money of an older colonist, and marrying his daughter, it is certain that, for a time at least, he grew a shade or two more respectable. Far from being a woman of refinement, his wife had more character and more strength than he, and brought him, not indeed into the highways of wisdom, but into certain by-paths of prudence.

Upon his return to his native country, they were everywhere received, but had it not been for their reported wealth, I doubt if the ladies of the county, after some experience of her manners and speech, which were at times very rough, would have continued to call on Mrs. Wylder.

But everybody liked Barbara. Nobody could imagine how such a flower could have come of two such thistles. She seemed to regard everyone as of her own family. And her brain was as active as her heart. She wanted to know what people thought and felt and imagined, what everything was, how a thing was done, and how it ought to be done. She seemed to understand what the animals were thinking and what the flowers were feeling.

Barbara spent most of her life in the open air and sought the acquaintance of every living thing she saw. She was a child of the whole world. She could sit on a horse’s bare back even better than with a saddle, could guide him almost as well with a halter as with a bridle, and in general control him without either. She did not remember a time she could not swim, and she ran herself against every new horse to find what he could do. She was so small that she looked fragile, but had nerves such as few men can boast, and muscles like steel. It never occurred to her not to say what she thought, believed, or felt. She was a special favourite at Mortgrange. She bewitched the man of the world, sir Wilton, and the cold eye of his lady gleamed at the thought of her dowry. Her father hoped for someone a little higher than a mere baronetcy for her, but he had in no way interfered.