of energy like a blossoming, red-flowered bush in motion. She, too,
seemed to come out of the old England, ruddy, strong, with a certain
crude, passionate quiescence and a hawthorn robustness. And he, he was
tall and slim and agile, like an English archer with his long supple legs
and fine movements. Her hair was nut-brown and all in energic curls and
tendrils. Her eyes were nut-brown, too, like a robin's for brightness.
And he was white-skinned with fine, silky hair that had darkened from
fair, and a slightly arched nose of an old country family. They were a
beautiful couple.

The house was Winifred's. Her father was a man of energy, too. He had
come from the north poor. Now he was moderately rich. He had bought this
fair stretch of inexpensive land, down in Hampshire. Not far from the
tiny church of the almost extinct hamlet stood his own house, a
commodious old farmhouse standing back from the road across a bare
grassed yard. On one side of this quadrangle was the long, long barn or
shed which he had made into a cottage for his youngest daughter
Priscilla. One saw little blue-and-white check curtains at the long
windows, and inside, overhead, the grand old timbers of the high-pitched
shed. This was Prissy's house. Fifty yards away was the pretty little new
cottage which he had built for his daughter Magdalen, with the vegetable
garden stretching away to the oak copse. And then away beyond the lawns
and rose trees of the house-garden went the track across a shaggy, wild
grass space, towards the ridge of tall black pines that grew on a
dyke-bank, through the pines and above the sloping little bog, under the
wide, desolate oak trees, till there was Winifred's cottage crouching
unexpectedly in front, so much alone, and so primitive.

It was Winifred's own house, and the gardens and the bit of common and
the boggy slope were hers: her tiny domain. She had married just at the