ow serious it was, nor what it meant. Oh! I _am_
sorry--there was so much I wanted to do here--if anybody could only
understand what it means to me to come to this place!"

They had reached the brow of a little rising ground. Just below them,
beyond a stubble field in which there were a few bent forms of gleaners,
lay the small scattered Tillage, hardly seen amid its trees, the curls
of its blue smoke ascending steadily on this calm September morning
against a great belt of distant beechwood which begirt the hamlet and
the common along which it lay. The stubble field was a feast of shade
and tint, of apricots and golds shot with the subtlest purples and
browns; the flame of the wild-cherry leaf and the deeper crimson of the
haws made every hedge a wonder; the apples gleamed in the cottage
garden; and a cloudless sun poured down on field and hedge, and on the
half-hidden medley of tiled roofs, sharp gables, and jutting dormers
which made the village.

Instinctively both stopped. Marcella locked her hands behind her in a
gesture familiar to her in moments of excitement; the light wind blew
back her dress in soft, eddying folds; for the moment, in her tall
grace, she had the air of some young Victory poised upon a height, till
you looked at her face, which was, indeed, not exultant at all, but
tragic, extravagantly tragic, as Aldous Raeburn, in his English reserve,
would perhaps have thought in the case of any woman with tamer eyes and
a less winning mouth.

"I don't want to talk about myself," she began. "But you know, Mr.
Raeburn--you must know--what a state of things there is here--you know
what a _disgrace_ that village is. Oh! one reads books, but I never
thought people could actually _live_ like that--here in the wide
country, with room for all. It makes me lie awake at night. We are not
rich--we are very poor--the house is all out of repair, and the estate,
as of course you know, is in a wretched condition. But when I see these
cottages, and the water, and the children, I ask what right we have to
anything we get. I had some friends in London who were Socialists, and I
followed and agreed with them, but here one _sees_! Yes, indeed!--it
_is_ too great a risk to let the individual alone when all these lives
depend upon him. Uncle Robert was an eccentric and a miser; and look at
the death-rate of the village--look at the children; you can see how it
has crushed the Hardens already. No, we have no right to it!--it ou