"Eight years."

Stella laughed wistfully.

"To me it seems a century." She was silent for a moment, and though he
spoke to her urgently she did not answer. She was carried back to the
high broad hills of grass with the curious clumps of big beech-trees upon
their crests.

"Do you remember Halnaker Gallop?" she asked with a laugh. "We found it
when the chains weren't up and had the whole two miles free. Was there
ever such grass?"

She was looking straight at the bureau, but she was seeing that green
lane of shaven turf in the haze of an August morning. She saw it rise and
dip in the open between long brown grass. There was a tree on the
left-hand side just where the ride dipped for the first time. Then it ran
straight to the big beech-trees and passed between them, a wide glade of
sunlight, and curved out at the upper end by the road and dipped down
again to the two lodges.

"And the ridge at the back of Charlton forest, all the weald to Leith
Hill in view?" She rose suddenly from her chair. "Oh, I am sorry that
you came."

"And I am glad," repeated Thresk.

The stubbornness with which he repeated his words arrested her. She
looked at him--was it with distrust, he asked himself? He could not be
sure. But certainly there was a little hard note in her voice which had