the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow
and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village--roofs and
gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed
brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths
of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over
the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house,
now it was half ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the
squire of the day had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should
exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished
the rectory; so that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany
doors and carved cupboard fronts, in which Robert delighted, and in
which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure.

Altogether a quiet, rural, English spot. If the house had no beauty, it
commanded a world of loveliness. All around it--north, south, and
west--there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood
and grassy common, in which the few workaday patches of hedge and
ploughed land seemed ingulfed and lost. Close under the rectory windows,
however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the
largest and fruitfulest of the neighbourhood. At the present moment it
was just ready for the reaper--the golden ears had clearly but a few
more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was bounded by a dark
summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, over the distance, rose a blue
pointed hill, which seemed to be there only to attract and make a centre
for the sunsets.

As compared with her Westmoreland life, the first twelve months of
wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing
experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford.
It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the
senior members of the University were already in residence, and the
stagnation of the Long Vacation was over. Langham was up; so was Mr.
Grey, and many another old friend of Robert's. The bride and bridegroom
were much feted in a quiet way. They dined in many common rooms and
bursaries; they were invited to many luncheons, whereat the
superabundance of food and the length of time spent upon it made the
Puritan Catherine uncomfortable; and Langham devoted himself to taking
the wife through colleges and gardens, Schools and Bodleian, in most
orthodox fashion, indemnifying himself