was frozen into silence.

The only sounds were the soft stir the snow, falling from branches or
walls, made and the sharp cries of some children playing in a field near
at hand.

When Miss Crale had gone Rachel went off for a walk. Jacob was with her.
She struck up the winding path on to the Downs. The snow was hard and
yielded a pleasant friendly crunch beneath her feet. Shadows that were
dark and yet were filled with colour lay across the snow; beneath her a
white valley against which trees and buildings seemed little wooden toys
and, in the far distance, hills rising, cut, with their iridescent glow,
the blue sky.

No clouds; no movement; no sound: and soon the sun would be golden and
then hard and red, and then across all the snow pink shadows would creep
and the evening stars would burn--

In the heart of the snow, a valley between the shoulders of the Downs, a
black clump of trees clustered; she could see, now, Seddon Court like a
grey box at her feet, very tiny and breathing rest and peace.

Some of her trouble slipped from her under this clear sky and in this
sharp air; from these quiet hills she saw all her introspection as an
evil thing, morbid, cowardly; from here it seemed to her that her
trouble with Roddy had been because he did not know what introspection
meant and could not understand the appeals that she made to him.

But was it not unfair that men should have so many things that could
take the place of love? For Roddy there were a thousand emotions to give
meaning to life: for Rachel all experience seemed to come to her only
through people and her relations with people.

Soon the valley and the little toy houses were behind her and she had
only the white rise and fall of the hill on every side. Dropped into a
hollow was a little dark deserted house with bare trees about it;
otherwise there was no dwelling-place to be seen.

This absence of human life suddenly drew up before her, as sharply and
with as living an actuality as though some mirage had cast it
there--London--

Three months in the country had flung the London that she knew into a
vivid perspective that was quite novel to her. By the London that she
knew she did not mean the London of parties and theatre, the London of
Nita and her kind, but rather the actual London of the streets and
squares and fountain and parks and dusty plane trees and tinkling
organ-grinders.

She felt now quite a thrill of excitement to think that, in anothe