‘Come and sit by the river, and I shall tell you everything you care to hear,’ said Phil. And Carrie, nothing loath, sat down on the bank, gathered her torn flounces around her, and gave a surreptitious smooth to her straying locks. ‘Well, I must tell you, you are a trespasser, Carrie, on my father’s land. But ’twould be an ungracious way to renew an old friendship to arrest you—so I let that pass. My father, if you must know, is Mr. Richard Meadowes of Fairmeadowes—the house you see far away there among the trees; that is how I come to be here.’ ‘Do you live always here then?’ asked Carrie. ‘I? no—I am but come from Oxford for Easter. I am alone here though just now. My father is in town.—But you have not yet told me how you are here, Carrie?’ ‘I am visiting my aunt, Lady Mallow. She hath taken Forde, the house which stands on the sloping ground about half a mile from here along the high road. And indeed, indeed, Phil, I have come near running away to London, so dull have I been these four days since I came to Wynford.’ ‘Dull—ah, ’tis a terrible thing to be dull,’ said Phil sympathetically; ‘once I was dull—just once in life, and I made the resolve never to suffer it again. I can bear to be unhappy, or even to be in pain; but dulness—never. I’d sooner get drunk than be dull!’ And at that the young man went off into a curiously ringing laugh that sounded across the fields like a bell. ‘Then are you never dull here?’ asked Carrie in amazement. ‘O no—never. I come here once or twice in the year, and I bring with me books to last me all the time and more; sometimes I work hard, hard, till I feel as though my brain would crack—’tis rather nice that, and then I come down here by the river and amuse myself; or I ride, or shoot the crows, or anything else there is to shoot. But the first morning I waken at an end of my resources, that day I leave Wynford. Oh, but I love Fairmeadowes. I never tire here.’ ‘You are just the same,’ said Carrie, more emphatically than before; ‘to hear you talk—’tis just as you used to.’ She looked down at Phil as she spoke. He had flung himself down on the bank at her feet, and was gazing up at her in the frankest manner possible. ‘Why, how old are you?’ she asked suddenly, as unceremonious as he was, and Phil answered without a moment’s hesitation, ‘One-and-twenty, and horribly young it is—but there is all the world to conquer, to be sure, and only one life to do it in.’ Carrie opened her eyes at this statement. ‘How?’ she inquired.