with the world as it was-she avoided
all companionship on her ride. She wanted to be told of things that were
not, yet might be, to peep behind the curtain, and see the very spirit of
mortal happenings escaped from prison. And this was all so unusual with
Barbara, whose body was too perfect, too sanely governed by the flow of
her blood not to revel in the moment and the things thereof. She knew it
was unusual. After her ride she avoided lunch, and walked out into the
lanes. But about two o'clock, feeling very hungry, she went into a
farmhouse, and asked for milk. There, in the kitchen, like young
jackdaws in a row with their mouths a little open, were the three farm
boys, seated on a bench gripped to the alcove of the great fire-way,
munching bread and cheese. Above their heads a gun was hung, trigger
upwards, and two hams were mellowing in the smoke. At the feet of a
black-haired girl, who was slicing onions, lay a sheep dog of tremendous
age, with nose stretched out on paws, and in his little blue eyes a gleam
of approaching immortality. They all stared at, Barbara. And one of the
boys, whose face had the delightful look of him who loses all sense of
other things in what he is seeing at the moment, smiled, and continued
smiling, with sheer pleasure. Barbara drank her milk, and wandered out
again; passing through a gate at the bottom of a steep, rocky tor, she
sat down on a sun-warmed stone. The sunlight fell greedily on her here,
like an invisible swift hand touching her all over, and specially
caressing her throat and face. A very gentle wind, which dived over the
tor tops into the young fern; stole down at her, spiced with the fern
sap. All was warmth and peace, and only the cuckoos on the far thorn
trees--as though stationed by the Wistful Master himself--were there to
disturb her heart: But all the sweetness and piping of the day did not
soothe her. In truth, she could not have said what was the matter,
except that she felt so discontented, and as it were empty of all but a
sort of aching impatience with--what exactly she could not say. She had
that rather dreadful feeling of something slipping by which she could not
catch. It was so new to her to feel like that--for no girl was less given
to moods and repinings. And all the time a sort of contempt for this
soft and almost sentimental feeling made her tighten her lips and frown.
She felt distrustful and sarcastic towards a mood so utterly subversive