bolts and bars, stepped
from the door into the dew, the sunlight, the keen young air.

She took the path to the left that led through the sycamore wood, and
crossing the narrow brook by a little plank and hand rail, passed into
the meadows where, in Spring, she and Augustine used to pick cowslips.

She thought of Augustine, but only in that distant past, as a little
child, and her mind dwelt on sweet, trivial memories, on the toys he had
played with and the pair of baby-shoes, bright red shoes, square-toed,
with rosettes on them, that she had loved to see him wear with his
little white frocks. And in remembering the shoes she smiled again, as
she had smiled in hearing the noisy chirpings of the waking birds.

The little path ran on through meadow after meadow, stiles at the
hedges, planks over the brooks and ditches that intersected this flat,
pastoral country. She paused for a long time to watch the birds hopping
and fluttering in a line of sapling willows that bordered one of these
brooks and at another stood and watched a water-rat, unconscious of her
nearness, making his morning toilette on the bank; he rubbed his ears
and muzzle hastily, with the most amusing gesture. Once she left the
path to go close to some cows that were grazing peacefully; their
beautiful eyes, reflecting the green pastures, looked up at her with
serenity, and she delighted in the fragrance that exhaled from their
broad, wet nostrils.

"Darlings," she found herself saying.

She went very far. She crossed the road that, seen from Charlock House,
was, with its bordering elm-trees, only a line of blotted blue. And all
the time the light grew more splendid and the sun rose higher in the
vast dome of the sky.

She returned more slowly than she had gone. It was like a dream this
walk, as though her spirit, awake, alive to sight and sound, smiling and
childish, were out under the sky, while in the dark, sad house the
heavily throbbing heart waited for its return.

This waiting heart seemed to come out to meet her as once more she saw
the sycamores dark on the sky and saw beyond them the low stone house.
The pearly, the crystalline interlude, drew to a close. She knew that in
passing from it she passed into deep, accepted tragedy.

The sycamores had grown so tall since she first came to live at Charlock
House that the foliage made a high roof and only sparkling chinks of sky
showed through. The path before her was like the narrow aisle of a