There was a field of wheat not so far from The Weir. It was approached by a stile from the roadway and a narrow path went through it to the Clieve-don Woods as evenly as a canal divides a landscape. At the further end there was another stile and a bank of low trees, with a hollow and a slope overgrown with green grass and a myriad of wild flowers beloved by bees. A grass meadow with a little stream creeping through it, and here and there a tuft of rushes; behind all the long high ridge of the woods--these are the details of which one becomes aware when one has begun to recover from the vast wonder of the field of wheat. Josephine was not wearing a hat. She had merely picked up a crimson sunshade after breakfast on the Monday, and had gone alone strolling through the garden, a magazine under her arm. She had given her maid instructions to be ready to start for town after lunch--the other guests, with the exception of Pierce Winwood, had already taken their departure, and Pierce Winwood had gone to Marlow with Lady Severn and Amber. That was how Josephine came to be alone, and to be glad to be alone. She had become aware of the fact that she had something to think about, and she hoped that half an hour on the green shorn breadths of grass with the river at her feet and the whisper of the weir in her ears would be a relief to her. She strolled down the lawn to the river, but a steamer with people aboard drinking out of bottles and playing on banjos, when the sexes had duly exchanged hats, was hooting for the lock-keeper, so she turned away to the upper part of the garden. She found that she had more to think about than the garden would contain, so she passed out by the little gate to the silent road and stood for a moment looking along its dusty curve to where it got lost in the dimness of overshadowing trees, and then, in the other direction, where it twisted round by the boathouse at the bridge. She began to walk in this direction, slowly and listlessly, and when she came to the stile leading to the wheatfield, she mounted it, and remained for some time on the topmost step gazing along the surface of that yellow flaming plain lost in the marvel of it, when there came a wind too light for her to feel upon her face, and fanned the moveless breadth of flame into a thousand flickers, and the whole wide field of a hundred acres became quickly alive, and full of the whisperings of newly acquired vitality.