I suppose. There had been
nearly a month's drought, and the whole place was like so much tinder.
There was an easterly breeze too. You can imagine the blaze! We hadn't
the faintest chance. Poor, old Iles lost his head completely, and sat
down with his feet in a dry ditch and wept. There must be over two
hundred acres of it. It's a dreadful eyesore, perfectly barren and
useless, but for a little sour grass even a gipsy's donkey has to be
hard up before he cares to eat!"--Miss St. Quentin shifted her position
with a certain impatience. "I can't bear to see the land doing no
work," she said.

"Doing no work?" Dickie inquired. He began to be interested in the
conversation from other than a purely practical and local standpoint.

"Of course," she asserted. "The land has no more right to lie idle than
any of the rest of us--unless it's a bit of tilth sweetening in fallow
between two crops. That is reasonable enough. But for the rest," she
said, a certain brightness and self-forgetting gaining on her--"let it
contribute its share all the while, like an honest citizen of the
universe. Let it work, most decidedly let it work."

"And what about such trifles as the few hundred square miles of desert
or mountain range?" Richard inquired, half amused, half--and that
rather unwillingly--charmed. "They are liable to be a thorn in the side
of the--well, socialist."

"Oh, I've no quarrel with them. They come under a different
head."--Honoria's manner had ceased to be in any degree embarrassed,
though a slight perplexity came into her expression. For just then she
remembered, somehow, her pacings of the station platform at Culoz, the
salutation of the bleak, pure, evening wind from out the fastnesses of
the Alps, and all her conversation there with her faithful admirer,
Ludovic Quayle. And it occurred to her what singular contrast in
sentiment that bleak evening wind offered to the mild, moist, westerly
wind--complaint of the homeless baby, Spring--which had just now cried
against her bosom! And again Honoria became conscious of being in
contact, both in herself and in her surroundings, with more coercing,
more vital drama than she could either interpret or place. Again
something of fear invaded her, to combat which she hurried into
speech.--"No, I haven't any quarrel with deserts and so on," she
repeated. "They're uncommonly useful things for mankind to knock its
head against--invincible, unnegotiable, splendidly competent to teach