an of a mount.

Miss Tancred seemed aware that nothing was expected from her, and
kept conscientiously out of his way. He saw nothing of her from
breakfast till dinnertime and the evening, when she appeared as his
official partner in the game of whist. What became of her in the
meanwhile he did not know; he could only vaguely conjecture. She
seemed to vanish, to lose herself in the vast workings of Coton
Manor, or in that vaster entity, the Colonel.

By the fourth day Durant's irritable mood had changed to
resignation. If he could not altogether adopt Mrs. Fazakerly's
attitude and smile pleasantly into the jaws of dulness, he consented
to be bored to death with a certain melancholy grace.

He had made a dash for freedom; he had actually started first thing
in the morning with his sketching block and easel, and was
congratulating himself on his benignant chance, when, as he sneaked
round a corner of the house, the Colonel stepped out upon him from a
side window. There was one hope for him. Rain had fallen over
night, and the little gentleman was as yet in his slippers; he was
feeling the damp gravel like a fastidious cat.

"Ah-ha!" said he, in the tone of joyful encounter. "And what do you
propose to do with yourself this morning?"

Durant looked at his host with a sad reproachful gaze from which all
bitterness had departed. He had felt inclined to reply that he
proposed to commit suicide; as it was, he only said he thought of
trying to sketch something.

The Colonel seemed a little offended at the proposal; it certainly
implied that Durant had more confidence in his own resources than in
those of the house.

"So that's your fad, is it? I think we can do better for you than
that."

And as Durant had calculated he skipped back into the house, and
before he could return with his boots on, Durant, by another miracle
of chance or his own cunning, had contrived his escape.

He made his way up a slight slope, whence he could see far over the
landscape. What he had as yet seen was not inspiring, the heavy
full-blown charm of the Midlands in July, lonely, without any of the
poetry of loneliness. As he looked about him he realized again that
he was in the heart of the country, the great, slow, passionless
heart whose pulses are interminable hours. If you love Nature as
Durant loved her, for her sex with its divine caprices, its madness
and its mystery, you will be disappointed with Wickshire. In
Wickshire Mother Natu