of the
carriage, and swung away round the angle of the house, Katherine came
swiftly down the steps again smiling, kissing her hand to him. Still,
the strap hurt--not poor Dickie's somewhat ill-balanced body, to which
in truth it lent an agreeable sense of security, but his, just then,
all too sensitive mind. So that, notwithstanding a fine assumption of
gaiety, as he kissed his hand in return, he found the dear vision of
his mother somewhat blurred by foolish tears which he had resolutely to
wink away.

But now that disquieting incident was left nearly ten minutes behind.
The last park gate and its cluster of mellow-tinted thatched cottages
was past. Not only out-of-doors and all the natural exhilaration of it,
but the spectacle of the world beyond the precincts of the park--into
which world he, in point of fact, so rarely penetrated--wooed him to
interest and enjoyment. To Dickie, whose life through his mother's
jealous tenderness and his own physical infirmity had been so
singularly circumscribed, there was an element, slightly pathetic, of
discovery and adventure in this ordinary afternoon drive.

He did not want to talk. He was too busy simply seeing, everything food
for those young eyes and brain so greedy of incident and of beauty. He
sat upright and stared at the passing show.--At the deep lane, its
banks starred with primroses growing in the hollows of the gnarled
roots of oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed,
bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy and
coton-easter. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church, standing in
its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by yew trees and
by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory garden
adjoining. At the Church Farm, just beyond--a square white house, the
slated roofs of it running up steeply to a central block of chimneys,
it having, in consequence, somewhat the effect of a monster
extinguisher. At the rows of pale, wheat stacks, raised on granite
straddles; at the prosperous barns, yards, and stables, built of wood
on brick foundations, that surround it, presenting a mass of rich,
solid colour and of noisy, crowded, animal life. At the fields, plough
and pasture, marked out by long lines of hedgerow trees, broken by
coppices--these dashed with tenderest green--stretching up and back to
the dark purple-blue range of the moorland. At scattered cottages, over
the gates of whose gardens gay with da