for vigorous walking. She was
dressed suitably and inoffensively in brown holland. She took him up
a long, gradually rising hill to where a group of firs stood on an
isolated mound.

Here Miss Tancred paused, with tilted profile, sniffing the ambient
air. "This," she said, "is the highest point in the county; there is
always a fresh breeze here; to-day you can smell the sea."

"Impossible; we must be right in the very center of England, about
a hundred miles from the nearest coast."

"You can hear it, then. Shut your eyes and listen."

He obeyed. The wind moved and the firs gave out their voice. He
opened his eyes and glanced at Miss Tancred. She was leaning up
against a fir; her eyes looked straight past him into the distance;
the wind had loosened the hair about her forehead; her lips were
parted, her eyes shone; there was an eagerness in her face he had
not yet seen there. It was as if a dead woman had been suddenly made
alive before him. She was gazing and listening.

"If you've never been out of Wickshire, where have you heard the
sea?"

She answered curtly, "I don't know where I've heard it"; then added,
as if by way of apology for her manner, "Do you like it?"

"Immensely."

"Then you must come up whenever you want to. You can always be alone
here."

She spoke as if she were giving him the freedom of her private
sanctuary.

"Have you any sketches of those places you've been to abroad?"

"Sketches? Any amount."

"Have you brought them with you?"

He blushed. He had brought many sketches in the hope of showing them
to a wealthy godfather and an admiring god-sister.

"Some--a few."

"I wish you'd show them to me."

"I shall be delighted." He blushed again, this time for pleasure.
With the desire to bestow a little of it, he asked rashly, "Do you
sketch, Miss Tancred? I saw some water-colors----"

"They were my mother's. I do nothing."

"Oh, I see." (They were going home now.) "I was wondering what on
earth you found to do here."

"I? A great many things. Business chiefly. My father is secretary to
the Primrose League. I write all his letters for him."

"That's one way of being secretary to the Primrose League."

"The usual way, I think. Secretaries generally have
under-secretaries, haven't they? My father dictates."

Durant smiled. He could see him doing it. "What else does Colonel
Tancred do?"

"He does no end of things. All the business of the estate; and he
speaks, at meetings, e