that in
Glebeshire more than in any other place in the world thrill and stir the
heart. Generally they give very little in actual reward and are followed
by weeks of hail and sleet and wind, but for that reason alone their
burning promise is beyond all other promises beguiling. Jeremy got up
one morning to feel that somewhere behind the thick wet mists of the
early hours there was a blazing sun. After breakfast, opening the window
and leaning out, he could see the leaves of the garden still shining
with their early glitter and the earth channelled into fissures and
breaks, dark and hard under the silver-threaded frost; beneath the rind
of the soil he could feel the pushing, heaving life struggling to answer
the call of the sun above it. Far down the road towards the Orchards a
dim veil of gold was spreading behind the walls of mist; the sparrows
on the almond tree near his window chattered like the girls of the High
School, and blue shadows stole into the dim grey sky, just as light
breaks upon an early morning sea; the air was warm behind the outer wall
of the frosty morning, and the faint gold of the first crocus beneath
the garden wall near the pantry door, where always the first crocuses
came, caught his eye. Even as he watched the sun burst the mist, the
trees changed from dim grey to sharp black, the blue flooded the sky,
and the Cathedral beyond the trees shone like a house of crystal.

All this meant spring, and spring meant hunting for snowdrops in the
Meads. Jeremy informed Miss Jones, and Miss Jones was, of course,
agreeable. They would walk that way after luncheon.

The Meads fall in a broad green slope from the old Cathedral battlement
down to the River Pol. Their long stretches of meadow are scattered
with trees, some of the oldest oaks in Glebeshire, and they are finally
bounded by the winding path of the Rope Walk that skirts the river bank.
Along the Rope Walk in March and April the daffodils first, and the
primroses afterwards, are so thick that, from the Cathedral walls, the
Rope Walk looks as though it wandered between pools and lakes of gold.
In the Orchards on the hill also they run like rivers.

Upon this afternoon there were only the trees, faintly pink, along the
river and the wide unbroken carpet of green. Miss Jones walked up and
down the Rope Walk, whilst Mary told her an endless and exceedingly
confused story that had begun more than a week ago and had reached by
now such a state of "To be