GONE TO EARTH




by Mary Webb

1917





[Dedication]
_To him whose presence is home._




Chapter 1


Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled
sky--shepherdless, futile, imponderable--and were torn to fragments
on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures
with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

It was cold in the Callow--a spinney of silver birches and larches that
topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and
a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.