“This,” said Sophie, nearly pushing out the thin casement in an attempt to see round the corner, “is--what did the hack-cabman say to the railway porter about my trunk--'quite on the top?'” “No; 'a little bit of all right.' I feel farther away from anywhere than I've ever felt in my life. We must find out where the telegraph office is.” “Who cares?” said Sophie, wandering about, hairbrush in hand, to admire the illustrated weekly pictures pasted on door and cupboard. But there was no rest for the alien soul till he had made sure of the telegraph office. He asked the Clokes' daughter, laying breakfast, while Sophie plunged her face in the lavender bush outside the low window. “Go to the stile a-top o' the Barn field,” said Mary, “and look across Pardons to the next spire. It's directly under. You can't miss it--not if you keep to the footpath. My sister's the telegraphist there. But you're in the three-mile radius, sir. The boy delivers telegrams directly to this door from Pardons village.” “One has to take a good deal on trust in this country,” he murmured. Sophie looked at the close turf, scarred only with last night's wheels, at two ruts which wound round a rickyard, and at the circle of still orchard about the half-timbered house. “What's the matter with it?” she said. “Telegrams delivered to the Vale of Avalon, of course,” and she beckoned in an earnest-eyed hound of engaging manners and no engagements, who answered, at times, to the name of Rambler. He led them, after breakfast, to the rise behind the house where the stile stood against the skyline, and, “I wonder what we shall find now,” said Sophie, frankly prancing with joy on the grass. It was a slope of gap-hedged fields possessed to their centres by clumps of brambles. Gates were not, and the rabbit-mined, cattle-rubbed posts leaned out and in. A narrow path doubled among the bushes, scores of white tails twinkled before the racing hound, and a hawk rose, whistling shrilly. “No roads, no nothing!” said Sophie, her short skirt hooked by briers. “I thought all England was a garden. There's your spire, George, across the valley. How curious!” They walked toward it through an all-abandoned land. Here they found the ghost of a patch of lucerne that had refused to die: there a harsh fallow surrendered to yard-high thistles; and here a breadth of rampant kelk feigning to be lawful crop. In the ungrazed pastures swaths of dead stuff caught their feet, and the ground beneath glistened with sweat. At the bottom of the valley a little brook had undermined its footbridge, and frothed in the wreckage. But there stood great woods on the slopes beyond--old, tall, and brilliant, like unfaded tapestries against the walls of a ruined house.