them both. They too felt that they did not belong to the London world any
more. Crockham had changed their blood: the sense of the snakes that
lived and slept even in their own garden, in the sun, so that he, going
forward with the spade, would see a curious coiled brownish pile on the
black soil, which suddenly would start up, hiss, and dazzle rapidly away,
hissing. One day Winifred heard the strangest scream from the flower-bed
under the low window of the living room: ah, the strangest scream, like
the very soul of the dark past crying aloud. She ran out, and saw a long
brown snake on the flower-bed, and in its flat mouth the one hind leg of
a frog was striving to escape, and screaming its strange, tiny, bellowing
scream. She looked at the snake, and from its sullen flat head it looked
at her, obstinately. She gave a cry, and it released the frog and slid
angrily away.

That was Crockham. The spear of modern invention had not passed through
it, and it lay there secret, primitive, savage as when the Saxons first
came. And Egbert and she were caught there, caught out of the world.

He was not idle, nor was she. There were plenty of things to be done, the
house to be put into final repair after the workmen had gone, cushions
and curtains to sew, the paths to make, the water to fetch and attend to,
and then the slope of the deep-soiled, neglected garden to level, to
terrace with little terraces and paths, and to fill with flowers. He
worked away, in his shirt-sleeves, worked all day intermittently doing
this thing and the other. And she, quiet and rich in herself, seeing him
stooping and labouring away by himself, would come to help him, to be
near him. He of course was an amateur--a born amateur. He worked so hard,
and did so little, and nothing he ever did would hold together for long.
If he terraced the garden, he held up the earth with a couple of long
narrow planks that soon began to bend with the pressure from behind, and