he wind
that the mechanic trunks were as much a natural feature of the landscape
as the trees, themselves not much less lean and sparse. It was a view of
such extension that roads more remote were faint scars on the hills,
and the streams of the valley narrowed ultimately to thin blades of
steel. The traffic of generations might be thought to have converged
upon this town, so much did it produce the effect of waiting upon that
hillside, so little sense did it have of seeming to obtrude its presence
upon the surroundings.

Gradually the glances of Guy and Michael came back from the fading
horizons of this wide country to concentrate first upon the town and
then upon the spire that with glittering weather-vane rose lightly as
smoke from the gray fabric of its church, until finally they must have
rested simultaneously upon a long low house washed by one stream and by
another imprisoned within a small green island.

"It's to let," said Michael.

"I know," said Guy.

The unspoken thought that went sailing off upon the painted board was
only expressed by the eagerness with which they stared at the proffered
house.

"I might be able to take it," said Guy at last.

Michael looked at him in admiration. Such a project conceived in his
company did very definitely mark an altogether new stage and, as it
seemed to him, a somewhat advanced stage in his relationship with the
world.

They discovered the entrance immediately behind the almshouses in the
smell of whose ivy they had lingered on the bridge last night. They
passed through a wooden gateway in a high gray wall and, walking down a
stained gravel path between a number of gnarled fruit trees trimmed as
espaliers to conform with an antique mode of insuring fertility, they
came at last round an overgrown corner close against the house. Seen
from the hillside, it had quickly refined itself to be for them at least
the intention of that great view, of that wide country of etched-in
detail. The just background had been given, the only background that
would have enabled them to esteem all that was offered here in this form
of stone well-ordered, gray, indigenous, the sober crown of the valley.

Guy from the moment he saw it had determined to take this house: his
inquiries about the rent and the drains, his discussion of the terms of
the agreement, of the dampness within, of the size of the garden were
the merest conventions of the house-hunter, empty questions whose
answers