"What! With those wilted hedges and falling leaves and reaped
fields and golden haystacks, and--and--"

She glanced around for further illustrations in the way of
contradiction.

"I can see all those things, dear, and the misplaced day also!"

"Misplaced?"

"July day slipped into September. It comes into the landscape of
this autumn month, as does love into the hearts of an elderly
couple who feel too late the supreme passion."

Lucy's eyes swept the prospect, and the spring-like sunshine,
revealing all too clearly the wrinkles of aging Nature, assisted
her comprehension.

"I understand. Yet youth has its wisdom."

"And old age its experience. The law of compensation, my
dearest. But I don't see," he added reflectively, "what your
remark and my answer have to do with the view," whereat Lucy
declared that his wits wandered.

Within the last five minutes they had emerged from a sunken lane
where the hedges were white with dust and dry with heat to a vast
open space, apparently at the World's-End. Here the saltings
spread raggedly towards the stately stream of the Thames,
intersected by dykes and ditches, by earthen ramparts, crooked