So Biddy went sometimes, though she never ceased to wonder why the prayers should be read when there was scarcely anyone to listen to them. Once, indeed, there were only herself and Mr Roy in the church, and as they walked home together after the service she felt obliged to apologise. "Please, sir," she said, hurriedly drooping one knee as she walked, "I'm sorry you had to read all them long prayers jest for me." Whereupon Mr Roy tried to make her understand why he should still have read them, whether she had been there or not. Biddy did not feel very clear about it at the end of the explanation, though she was conscious that he "talked very kind," and she fell back on the thought that after all it was the country, and quite different from London. But this difference was "borne in upon her" most strongly of all when she went for the first time to the downs which closely surrounded Wavebury. Passing up the long straggling village with its thatched cottages, she came suddenly on them stretching away in the distance, pathless, and, as far as she could see, endless. Then she stood bewildered. Such lots of space everywhere; so much sky over her head; such a great green carpet under her feet, spread over the gentle rising and falling of the hills. All green, except for the scattered flocks of sheep, and the cairns of grey stones, and the groups of stunted thorn trees, bent and twisted and worried by the wind into a thousand odd shapes. Looking back towards the village, where part of the land had been cultivated, she could see the oxen ploughing, their horned heads clearly outlined against the sky, and--stranger sight still--long rows of women in flapping sun-bonnets bending patiently to their labour in the fields. Beyond these, a little collection of thatched roofs, and grey church, and yellow stacks, made up the village of Wavebury; after that, downs again as far as the eye could reach.