ready as it were for the sight of the magpie wings
of Life, and to hear their quick flutterings. Talk jarred on her that
morning, with its sameness and attachment to the facts of the present
and the future, its essential concern 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