back, with the addition of the speaker’s name. But soon she led the way over a stile, and along a path worn slightly darker than the dim green surrounding it. In front of them the sky now showed itself of a reddish-yellow, like a slice of some semilucent stone behind which a lamp burnt, while a fringe of black trees with distinct branches stood against the light, which was obscured in one direction by a hump of earth, in all other directions the land lying flat to the very verge of the sky. One of the swift and noiseless birds of the winter’s night seemed to follow them across the field, circling a few feet in front of them, disappearing and returning again and again.
Mary had gone this walk many hundred times in the course of her life, generally alone, and at different stages the ghosts of past moods would flood her mind with a whole scene or train of thought merely at the sight of three trees from a particular angle, or at the sound of the pheasant clucking in the ditch. But to-night the circumstances were strong enough to oust all other scenes; and she looked at the field and the trees with an involuntary intensity as if they had no such associations for her.
“Well, Ralph,” she said, “this is better than Lincoln’s Inn Fields, isn’t it? Look, there’s a bird for you! Oh, you’ve brought glasses, have you? Edward and Christopher mean to make you shoot. Can you shoot? I shouldn’t think so”
“Look here, you must explain,” said Ralph. “Who are these young men? Where am I staying?”
“You are staying with us, of course,’ she said boldly. “Of course, you’re staying with us—you don’t mind coming, do you?”
“If I had, I shouldn’t have come,” he said sturdily. They walked on in silence; Mary took care not to break it for a time. She wished Ralph to feel, as she thought he would, all the fresh delights of the earth and air. She was
