, a shade paler, and,
more rarely, gorse bushes, nearly brown, too, in their sober winter
dress. It was almost flat, a wonderful illimitable place, very remote,
very silent, unbroken except for occasional pine-trees. These were not
scattered but grew in clumps, miles apart, though looking near in this
place of distances, and also in a belt not more than five or six trees
wide, winding mile after mile like a black band over the plain. Julia
stood on the edge of this belt now, gathering the dropped cones and
putting them into a sack. The afternoon was advanced and already it
was beginning to grow dark among the trees, but she determined not to
go till she had got all she could carry. It was the first time she had
been to collect cones; she had sent her father once and Mr. Gillat
once. They had taken longer and gathered less than she, but it was not
on that account that she had gone herself to-day. Rather it was
because she wanted to go to the dark belt of trees which she saw every
day from her window, and because she wanted to go right out into the
wide open land and see what it looked like and feel what it felt like.
And when she got there she found it, like the Dunes, all she had
expected and more.

At last she had her sack full, and, shouldering it, carried it off on
her back, which, seeing the comfort of the arrangement, must be the
way Nature intended weights to be carried. Clear of the shadow of the
trees it was lighter; the grey sky held the light long; twilight
seemed to creep up from the ground rather than fall from above, as if
darkness were an earth-born thing that gained slowly, and, for a time,
only upon the brighter gift of Heaven. It was quieter, too, out here,
for under the pines, though the weather was still, there was a
breathing moan as if the trees sighed incessantly in their sleep. But
out here in the brown land it was very quiet; the air light and dry
and keen, with the flavour of the not distant sea mingled with the
smell of the pines and the dead ferns--a thing to stir the pulse and
revive the memory of the divine inheritance and the old belief that
man is but a little lower than the angels, related to the infinite and
god-like.

White's Cottage stood where the heath-land ceased and the sand began.
There was much sand; tradition said it had gradually overwhelmed a
village that lay beyond; indeed, that White's Cottage was the last and
most distant house of the lost place. Be that as it may, it cer