ession so that the house had been besieged and choked
with vegetation and mildewed with the dampness of rain and sap. It was
all very lush and generous and cool, no doubt, in summer; but when the
rain that drove in from the Channel glistened on the hung slates and
dripped incessantly from myriads of shining leaves, the Rector of
Lapton Huish might as well have been living in a tropical swamp. To
the north of them, the huge masses of Dartmoor stole the air, so that
their life seemed to be lost in a windless eddy, and in the deep
valleys with which the country was scored the air lay dead for many
months at a time. Gabrielle, accustomed to the free spaces of
Connemara, felt the change depressing, though she would not admit it;
indeed, she had far too many things to think about to have time for
speculating on her own health.

First of all the callers. At Roscarna the reputation of Jocelyn and,
above all, his relations with Biddy Joyce, had saved the Hewishes from
these formalities; and the great distances that separated the houses of
gentlefolk in the west of Ireland would have made hospitality a more
spontaneous and less formal affair in any case. In Devon, as Gabrielle
soon discovered, calling was a ritual complicated by innumerable shades
of social finesse. Lady Halberton had already coached her in the list
of people whom she must know, people she could safely know at a
distance, and people whom it was her duty to discourage. As soon as
she was settled in at Lapton the county descended on her and she was
overwhelmed with visitors from all three classes.

If she had been a stranger the Devonshire people would probably have
watched her with a preconceived suspicion and dislike for a couple of
years, but even her questionable qualities of youth and spontaneity
could not dispose of the fact that she had been born a Hewish and had
lately visited at Halberton House. In that mild climate people remain
alive, or, if you prefer it, asleep, longer than in any other part of
England, and the visitors who came flocking to Lapton were, for the
most part, in a stage of decrepit or suspended life. They drove
through the steep and narrow lanes in all sorts of ancient vehicles, in
jingles, victorias, barouches and enormous family drags. Their
coachmen, older and more withered than themselves, wore mid-Victorian
whiskers, and shiny cockades on their hats. In Gabrielle's
drawing-room the visitors sat on the extreme edges of thei