ngs, with its bare
walls and pale windows. She shivered a little, for her youth had been
accustomed to churches all color and lights and furnishings--churches of
another type and faith. But instantly some warm leaping instinct met the
shrinking, and overpowered it. She smote her hands together.

"England!--England!--my own, own country!"

She dropped upon the window-seat half laughing, yet the tears in her
eyes. And there, with her face pressed against the glass, she waited
while the dawn stole upon the night, while in the park the trees emerged
upon the grass white with rime, while on the face of the down thickets
and paths became slowly visible, while the first wreaths of smoke began
to curl and hover in the frosty air.

Suddenly, on a path which climbed the hill-side till it was lost in the
beech wood which crowned the summit, she saw a flock of sheep, and
behind them a shepherd boy running from side to side. At the sight, her
eyes kindled again. "Nothing changes," she thought, "in this country
life!" On the morning of Charles I.'s execution--in the winters and
springs when Elizabeth was Queen--while Becket lay dead on Canterbury
steps--when Harold was on his way to Senlac--that hill, that path were
there--sheep were climbing it, and shepherds were herding them. "It has
been so since England began--it will be so when I am dead. We are only
shadows that pass. But England lives always--always--and shall live!"

And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet
country scene.

The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun to inhabit stood upon
an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north and east
and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over and
sheltered by the downs. Pastures studded with trees sloped away from the
house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary woods;
only the church tower emerged. From the deep oriel window where she sat
Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its mellowed red
brick, its Jacobean windows and roof. She could see also a corner of the
moat with its running stream, a moat much older than the building it
encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal garden planned in the
days of John Evelyn--with its fountain and its sundial, and its beds in
arabesque. The cold light of December lay upon it all; there was no
special beauty in the landscape, and no magnificence in the house or its
surroundi