t it?
Notwithstanding its uncleanly name, it's really rather sweet."

To which she answered, speaking from out the wide background of her own
emotion and purpose:--

"Yes, yes--it's sad in a way, Richard, penetratingly, splendidly sad.
But one wouldn't have it otherwise; for it is splendid, and it is
sweet, abundantly sweet."--Then her tone changed.--"I won't keep you
waiting any longer, I'm coming," she said.

Honoria looked round the quaint, little room, with its half-adjusted
shelves and cupboards, the floor of it deep in resinous,
semi-transparent, wafer-coloured shavings, bidding it adieu. For good
or evil, happiness or sorrow, she was sensible it told for much in her
life's history. Then, something delicately militant in her carriage,
she swung away down-stairs and out of the house. She was going forth to
war indeed, to a war which in no shape or form had she ever waged as
yet. Many men had wooed her, and their wooing had left her cold. She
had never wooed any man. Why should she? To her no man had ever
mattered one little bit.

So she mounted, and they rode away.--A spin across the level turf to
hearten her up, satisfy the fulness of sensation which held her, and
shake her nerves into place. It was exhilarating. She grew keen and
tense, her whole economy becoming reliable and well-knit by the strong
exercise and sense of the superbly healthy and unperplexed vitality of
the horse under her. Honoria could have fought with dragons just then,
had such been there to fight with! But, in point of fact, nothing more
agressively dangerous presented itself for encounter than the shallow
ford which divides the parish of Farley from that of Sandyfield and the
tithing of Brockhurst. Snorting a little, the horses splashed through
the clear, brown water and entered upon the rough, rutted road, grass
grown in places, which, ending beneath a broken avenue of ancient,
stag-headed oaks, leads to the entrance of the Brockhurst woods. These,
crowned by the dark, ragged line of the fir forest, rose in a soft,
dense mass against the western sky, in which showed promise of a fair
pageant of sunset. A covey of partridges ran up the sandy ruts before
the horses, and, rising at last with a long-drawn whir of wings,
skimmed the top of the crumbling bank and dropped in the stubble-field
on the right. A pause, while the keeper's wife ran out to open the
white gate,--the dogs meanwhile, from their wooden kennels under the
Spanish chestnut