home down
the road together in little parties. Many salutations were addressed
to Mary, who shouted back, with the addition of the speaker's name. But
soon she led the way over a stile, and along a path worn slightly darker
than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the sky now showed
itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some semilucent stone behind
which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black trees with distinct branches
stood against the light, which was obscured in one direction by a hump
of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the very verge
of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds of the winter's night
seemed to follow them across the field, circling a few feet in front of
them, disappearing and returning again and again.

Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life,
generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would
flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the
sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the
pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were
strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field
and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such
associations for her.

"Well, Ralph," she said, "this is better than Lincoln's Inn Fields,
isn't it? Look, there's a bird for you! Oh, you've brought glasses, have
you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot? I
shouldn't think so--"

"Look here, you must explain," said Ralph. "Who are these young men?
Where am I staying?"

"You are staying with us, of course," she said boldly. "Of course,
you're staying with us--you don't mind coming, do you?"

"If I had, I shouldn't have come," he said sturdily. They walked on in
silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to
feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and
air. She was right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to her
comfort.

"This is the sort of country I thought you'd live in, Mary," he said,
pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. "Real country.
No gentlemen's seats."

He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many weeks
the pleasure of owning a body.

"Now we have to find our way through a hedge," said Mary. In the gap of
the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher's wire, set across a hole to trap a
rabbit.

"