any person had asked me that
an hour ago, I'd have agreed with Tom. But 'tis different now I've
seen your face."

Nuncey and the stationmaster were wise weather prophets. Here on the
uplands the grey veil of morning fell apart, and dissolved so
suddenly that before Hester had time to wonder the miracle was
accomplished. A flood of sunshine broke over the ripening cornfields
to right and left; the song of larks rang forth almost with a shout;
beyond the golden ridges of the wheat the grey vapour faded as breath
off a mirror, and lo! a clear line divided the turquoise sky from a
sea of intensest iris-blue. As she watched the transformation her
heart gave a lift, and the past few hours fell from her like an evil
dream. The stuffy compartment, the blear-eyed lamp, the train's roar
and rattle, the forlorn arrival on the windy platform--all slipped away
into a remote past. She had passed the gates of fear and entered an
enchanted land.

As she looked abroad upon it she marvelled at a hundred differences
between it and her native Midlands. It was wilder--infinitely
wilder--than Warwickshire, and at the same time less unkempt; far
more savage in outline, yet in detail sober almost to tidiness. It
seemed to acknowledge the hand of some great unknown gardener; and
this gardener was, of course, the sea-breeze now filling her lungs
and bracing her strength. The shaven, landward-bending thorns and
hollies, the close-trimmed hedgerow, the clean-swept highroad, alike
proclaimed its tireless attentions. It favoured its own plants,
too--the tamarisk on the hedge, the fuchsia and myrtle in the cottage
garden. As the spring-cart nid-nodded down the hill towards Troy,
the grey roofs of the town broke upon Hester's sight beyond a cloud
of fuchsia blossoms in a garden at the angle of the road.

So steep was the hill, and so closely these roofs and chimneys
huddled against it, that Hester leaned back with a catch of the
breath that set Nuncey laughing. For the moment she verily supposed
herself on the edge of a precipice. She caught one glimpse of a blue
water and the masts of shipping, and clutched at the cart-rail as the
old grey began to slither at a businesslike jog-trot down a street so
narrow that, to make way for them, passers-by on foot ran hastily to
the nearest doorways, whence one and all nodded good-naturedly at
Nuncey. Of some houses the doors were reached by steep flights of
steps tunnelled through the solid