treacherous and deceiving clay-sink. She struggled a little, but it was no use; she could not escape. For the time being, she was one of the immovable fixtures of the landscape; and so she was unmistakably doomed to stay, unless some one came to her rescue.
So overwhelmed and dismayed was she with the one half of her programme, the adventure, that, for the time being, she utterly forgot the other half of it, the man. But the Fates were kinder than Millicent; they did not forget; and in due course of time the man was forthcoming.
The training of Aunt Jenkins had always been a drag on her; it was a worse drag on her, even now, than the mud. To scream, to empty her pent-up distress in a noise loud enough to be heard by people of enough common sense to keep them from frequenting the clay-bed as a pleasure-resort, would, according to the Jenkinsonian tenets, be vulgar. Truly enough, she screamed, and she screamed frequently; but her screams were so mild, refined, and spiritless that they were scarcely heard even by the birds in the trees above her geological discovery.
There she stood, for half an hour, a perfect study in maidenly despondency. Her arms and her neck were about the only flexible portions of her anatomy which she could move; the clay held the rest of her, hopelessly and immovably fast. And even then, environed as she was, she exercised the extremest caution to keep her arms out of ungraceful positions.
"The test of thorough breeding," Aunt Jenkins had often declared, "is to recollect and exercise its unvarying laws under the most trying circumstances."
She was not exactly under the trying circumstances in the present case, but she was likely to be if she stayed there very much longer. She had no difficulty in recollecting the unvarying laws. Aunt Jenkins's precept was thoroughly well learned; and the result was an example of good breeding perfect enough to satisfy even the unvarying Aunt Jenkins herself, had she been there.
When Millicent's dejection was at high-water mark, and she was sure that no one would ever find her, and that soon her flagging strength would give out and let her sink out of sight, altogether, into a grave in that miry clay, she heard a noise. A considerable noise, too, it was, as if a man, and a very large man, was coming. And now Millicent's heart fluttered with a new distress: how could she, under such circumstances, face a man? She seemed to have entirely forgotten that she had been letting off those refined and inoffensive screams for the Bake of attracting the attention of a man; that her escape from the mud could only be engineered by a man; and, in fact, that a man—or an insatiable longing for one—had been the prime mover in getting her into this unhappy scrape: and yet, now that there was every reason tor believing that a man was coming, she closed her eyes, and covered them with her hands, to shut out the dreadful sight.
A moment later, and the refined ears of Millicent were treated to the sound of a suppressed snort, such as a locomotive might make if stopped suddenly when under a full head of steam. Then there was a brief silence, after which Millicent heard something which sounded as
