horses' feet.

So the Indian summer passed--that breathless season when even happiness
has its premonitions and its pangs. The umber fields, all ploughed and
harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening
spring. Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded the
valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made
pools in the hollows of the stone seat: that flung itself against
Honora's window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.
Sometimes she listened to it in the night.

She was watching. How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her
senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer. Now, she felt, was the
crisis at hand: the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the
balance. The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but
little time for thought, had relaxed. In these wet days had he begun to
brood a little? Did he show signs of a reversion to that other
personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she had
had? She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning at the
Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of having
looked on a superimposed portrait. That Chiltern which she called her
Viking, and which, with a woman's perversity, she had perhaps loved most
of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by. The life
of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open. Was he dead,
or sleeping? And if sleeping, would he awake? How softly she tread!

And in these days, with what exquisite, yet tremulous skill and courage
did she bring up the subject of that other labour they were to undertake
together--the life and letters of his father. In the early dusk, when
they had returned from their long rides, she contrived to draw Chiltern