Neither spoke much as they wended their way along the little paths of
silvery sand that intersected the common. The day was clear, with a milky,
blue-streaked sky; the distant foldings of the hills were of a deep,
hyacinthine blue.

From time to time Sir Basil glanced at the face beside him, thoughtful to
sadness, its dusky fairness set in black, but attentive, as always, to the
sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch
the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at
became at once more significant to him--the tangle of tenacious roots that
thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray
columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods,
the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a
creaking whir of wings, the amethyst stars of a bush of Michaelmas daisies,
showing over a whitewashed cottage wall, the far blue distance before them,
framed in the tracery of the beech-boughs. He knew that she loved it all
from the way she looked at it and, almost indignantly, as though against
some foolish threat, he felt himself asseverating, "It _is_ her home--she
knows it--the place she loves like that." And when they had made their wide
round, down the lane, up a grassy dell, into his park, where he had to show
her some trees that must come down; when they had skirted the park, along
its mossy, fern-grown wall, and under its overhanging branches, until, once
more, they were on the common and the white of Valerie's cottage glimmered
before them, he voiced this protest, saying to her, as he watched her eyes,
dwell on the dear little place, "You could never bear to leave all this for
good--even if, even if we let you; you know you couldn't."

Valerie looked round at him, and in his face, against its high background
of milk-streaked blue, she saw the embodiment of his words; it was that,