And so she did; and the horses jogged on and on, now slow, now fast, their bells jingling, and Donato’s whip making harmless circles and slashes over their heads; and houses and hedgerows, and slopes of mountain, flew past in a dream. James Beresford could see nothing but the wan lines of the face that rested on his shoulder, solemn in that deep sleep of weariness. How worn she was! how pale! growing whiter, he thought, and whiter, till sometimes in terror he stooped down close to make sure that the pale lips were parted by living breath. CHAPTER IV. THE THREE CHARITIES. To live at Sunninghill, with one’s feet on a level with the highest pinnacle of the big Castle at St. George’s, what a thing it was in summer! All that country is eloquent with trees--big beeches, big oaks, straight elms, sweet birch-trees; even the very holly-bushes, in their dark green, grow tall into prickly, straggling monsters, as big as the elms. But the triumph of the place perhaps is in spring, when the primroses come too thick for counting, and the woods are full of their fairy, indefinable fragrance. In the ripe summer there was no such lovely suggestion about; all was at that perfection which suggests only decay. The wild flowers were foxgloves, with here and there in the marshy places a lingering plume of meadow-sweet. The ferns had grown too strong and tall, like little trees. The woods were in their darkest, fullest garments of green; not another leaflet to come anywhere; all full, and mature, and complete. Wild honeysuckle waved flags of yellow and brown from the high branches of big trees, which it had caught and tangled in; and made the hedge into one big wall of flowers--almost too much when the sun was on it. In the very heart of August it was as cool in these shadowy wood-walks as in a Gothic chapel, and here and there on a little plateau of brown earth a bench underneath a tree offered rest and a view to the wayfarer. Mrs. Burchell was sitting on one of these, panting a little, on the special day we have to record. She was that rector’s wife already mentioned, who was a contemporary of Cherry Beresford, and who grudged so much that ‘two single women’ should have all the delights of Sunninghill. She was just Miss Cherry’s age, fat and fair, but more than forty, and she had seven children, and felt herself inconceivably in advance of Cherry, for whom she retained her old friendship however, modified by a little envy and a good deal of contempt. Cherry was an old maid; that of itself surely was quite enough to warrant the contempt and the envy. You had but to look at Mr. Burchell’s rectory, which lay at the foot of the hill under the shadow of the woods, but facing towards the high road, which was very dusty, and exposed without a tree to the blaze of the west, and to compare it with the beautiful house on the top of the hill, sheltered so carefully, not too much nor too little--set in velvet lawns and dewy gardens, dust