an, but for a few moments her thoughts waved
to and fro in that large tranquillity like pendent moss in a gentle
breeze. There was a stir of life in the little village; a window was
thrown open; a man came out to the pump and filled a bucket with water;
a child cried for its breakfast; the birds were singing in the trees.
But they barely rippled the calm. Isabel's eyes dwelt absently upon a
white line along a distant hill-top, made, no doubt, by Caesar's troops;
for she had heard that the mosaic floors of Roman houses had been
discovered under one of the fields in the neighborhood. This
information, imparted by Lord Hexam's cousin, Mrs. Throfton, a lady
interested in neither Bridge nor gossip, had not excited her as it might
have done before her archaeological experience at headquarters, but she
was glad to recall it now, for that white road, sharply insistent in the
surrounding green, was one of the perceptible vincula of history.

It was all old--old--old; an illimitable backward vista. And she was as
new, as out of tune with it as the motorcar flashing like a lost and
distracted comet along that hill-top in a cloud of historied dust: she
with her problems, her egoisms, the fateful independence of the modern
girl. In a fashion she was one of the chosen of earth, but she doubted
if the women who had toiled in these villages, or in centuries past had
lived their lives in the mansions of their indubious lords, had not had
greater compensations than she. Unbroken monotony and a saving sense of
the inevitable must in time create for the soul something of the
illimitable horizon of the vast level spaces of the earth.

And she? At twenty-five she had lost her old habit of staring with
veiled eyes into some sweet ambiguous future, her girlish intensity of
emotion. But her theories, in general, were sound, and she had ticketed
even her minor experiences. She knew that character was the most
significant of all individual forces, and that if developed in strict
adjustment to the highest demands of society, dragging strength out of
the powers of the universe, were it not inborn, the book of one's
objective future at least need never be closed prematurely by those
inexorable social forces, which, whatever the weak spots on the surface
of life, invariably place a man in the end according to his deserts. She
had seen her father, with all his advantages of birth and talents, and
early importance in the community, gradually shunned, s