first walks was to that spot beyond the pond where they had made
their afternoon camping-ground. The nut-hatches had fled--fled, Kendal
hoped, some time before, for the hand of the spoiler had been near their
dwelling, and its fragments lay scattered on the ground. He presently
learnt to notice that he never heard the sharp sound of the bird's
tapping beak among the woods without a little start of recollection.

Outside his walks, his days were spent in continuous literary effort. His
book was in a condition which called for all his energies, and he threw
himself vigorously into it. The first weeks were taken up with a long
review of Victor Hugo's prose and poetry, with a view to a final critical
result. It seemed to him that there was stuff in the great Frenchman to
suit all weathers and all skies. There were sombre, wind-swept days, when
the stretches of brown ling not yet in flower, the hurrying clouds, and
the bending trees, were in harmony with all the fierce tempestuous side
of the great Romantic. There were others when the homely, tender,
domestic aspect of the country formed a sort of framework and
accompaniment to the simpler patriarchal elements in the books which
Kendal had about him. Then, when the pages on Victor Hugo were
written, those already printed on Chateaubriand began to dissatisfy him,
and he steeped himself once more in the rolling artificial harmonies, the
mingled beauty and falsity of one of the most wonderful of styles, that
he might draw from it its secrets and say a last just word about it.

He knew a few families in the neighbourhood, but he kept away from them,
and almost his only connection with the outer world, during his first
month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Chateauvieux,
who was at Etretat with her husband. She wrote her brother very lively,
characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with
amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the
little Norman town swarms in the season.

After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look
restlessly at the Etretat postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there
a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public
sort of existence as the Etretat life. The bathing scenes, and the
fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread
of naturalism, became very flat to him. He was astonished that his sister
was not as anxious to st