Riding slowly, Rose recalled that haymaking party and her gradual
friendship, as the years went by, with the unsociable young Sales, a
friendship which had been tacitly recognized by them both when,
meeting her soon after his mother's death, he had laid his arms and
head on the low stone wall by which they were standing, and wept
without restraint. It was a display she could not have given herself
and it shocked her in a young man, but it left her in his debt. She
felt she owed something to a person who had shown such confidence in
her and though at the time she had been dumb and, as it seemed to her,
far from helpful, she did not forget her liability. However, she could
not remember it to the extent of marrying him; she had always shown
him more kindness than she really felt and, in considering these
things on her way home, she decided that she was still doing as much
as he could expect.

She had by this time turned another corner and the high bridge, swung
from one side of the gorge to the other, was before her. At the toll-house
was the red-faced man who had not altered in the whiteness of a
single hair since she had been taken across the bridge by her nurse
and allowed to peep fearfully through the railings which had towered
like a forest above her head. And the view from the bridge was still
for her a fairy vision.

Seawards, the river, now full and hiding its muddy banks which,
revealed, had their own opalescent beauty, went its way between the
cliffs, clothed on one hand with trees, save for a big red and yellow
gash where the stone was being quarried, and on the other with bare
rock, topped by the Downs spreading far out of sight. Landwards the