Sophia by Stanley J. Weyman

It must be confessed that the flicker of skirts with which Lady Betty ran down the steps when she started for her airing, still more a certain toss of the head that was its perfect complement, gave her mischievous soul huge delight; for she had watched a French maid, and knew them to be pure nature, and the very quintessence of the singing chambermaid's art. It was not impossible that as she executed them she had a person in her eye and meant him to profit by them; for by-and-by she repeated the performance at a point where two paths diverged, and where it put the fitting close to a very pretty pause of indecision. Tom was so hard on her heels that ordinary ears must have detected his tread; but that my lady heard nothing was proved by the fact that she chose the more retired track and tripped along it, humming and darting from flower to flower like some dainty insect let loose among the bracken.

She plucked at will, and buried her shapely little nose in the blossoms; she went on, she stopped, she went on again, and Tom let her go; until the path, after winding round a low spreading oak that closed the view from the house, began to descend into a sunny dell where it ran, a green ribbon of sward, through waist-high fern, leapt the brook by a single plank, and scaled the steeper side by tiny zig-zags.