ut--but she's gone up to London."

The Rector did not turn his head.

"My wife? Oh, going on first-rate. There's another! I say, Winlow, this
is too bad!"

The Hon. Geoffrey's pleasant voice was heard:

"Please not to speak to the man at the wheel!"

The Squire turned the mare and rode away; and the spaniel John, who
had been watching from a measured distance, followed after, his tongue
lolling from his mouth.

The Squire turned through a gate down the main aisle of the home covert,
and the nose and the tail of the spaniel John, who scented creatures to
the left and right, were in perpetual motion. It was cool in there. The
June foliage made one long colonnade, broken by a winding river of sky.
Among the oaks and hazels; the beeches and the elms, the ghostly body of
a birch-tree shone here and there, captured by those grosser trees which
seemed to cluster round her, proud of their prisoner, loth to let her
go, that subtle spirit of their wood. They knew that, were she gone,
their forest lady, wilder and yet gentler than themselves--they would
lose credit, lose the grace and essence of their corporate being.

The Squire dismounted, tethered his horse, and sat under one of those
birch-trees, on the fallen body of an elm. The spaniel John also sat and
loved him with his eyes. And sitting there they thought their thoughts,
but their thoughts were different.

For under this birch-tree Horace Pendyce had stood and kissed his wife
the very day he brought her home to Worsted Skeynes, and though he
did not see the parallel between her and the birch-tree that some poor
imaginative creature might have drawn, yet was he thinking of that
long past afternoon. But the spaniel John was not thinking of it; his
recollection was too dim, for he had been at that time twenty-eight
years short of being born.

Mr. Pendyce sat there long with his horse and with his dog, and from out
the blackness of the spaniel John, who was more than less asleep, there
shone at times an eye turned on his master like some devoted star.
The sun, shining too, gilded the stem of the birch-tree. The birds
and beasts began their evening stir all through the undergrowth, and
rabbits, popping out into the ride, looked with surprise at the spaniel
John, and popped in back again. They knew that men with horses had no
guns, but could not bring themselves to trust that black and hairy thing
whose nose so twitched whenever they appeared. The gnats came out to
d