You would
have sworn that Robin looked for another place and could not see one,
you would have sworn that they were shy of one another, and spoke
scarcely a dozen sentences. Yet they did very well each in the company
of the other; and Robin, indeed, before he had finished his partridge,
had conveyed to her that there was news that he had, and must give to
her before the day was out. She looked at him with enough dismay in her
face for him at least to read it; for she knew by his manner that it
would not be happy news.

So, too, when the fruit was done and dinner was over (for they had no
opportunity to speak at any length), again you would have sworn that the
last idea in his mind, as in hers, was that he should be the one to help
her to her saddle. Yet he did so; and he fetched her hawk for her, and
settled her reins in her hand; and presently he on one side of her, with
Mr. Fenton on the other side, were riding up through Padley chase; and
the talk and the laughter went up too.

II

Up on the high moors, in the frank-chase, here indeed was a day to make
sad hearts rejoice. The air was soft, as if spring were come before his
time; and in the great wind that blew continually from the south-west,
bearing the high clouds swiftly against the blue, ruffling the stiff
heather-twigs and bilberry beneath--here was wine enough for any
mourners. Before them, as they went--two riding before, with falconers
on either side a little behind and the lads with the dogs beside them,
and the rest in a silent line some twenty yards to the rear--stretched
the wide, flat moor like a tumbled table-cloth, broken here and there by
groups of wind-tossed beech and oak, backed by the tall limestone crags
like pillar-capitals of an upper world; with here and there a little
shallow quarry whence marble had been taken for Derby. But more lovely
than all were the valleys, seen from here, as great troughs up whose
sides trooped the leafless trees--lit by the streams that threw back the
sunlit sky from their bosoms; with here a mist of smoke blown all about
from a village out of sight, here the shadow of a travelling cloud that
fled as swift as the wind that drove it, extinguishing the flash of
water only to release it again, darkening a sweep of land only to make
the sunlight that followed it the more sweet.

Yet the two saw little of this, dear and familiar as they found it;
since, first they rode together, and next, as it should be with young