Sutton had found for her the most perfect pony, whose silky coat, lean well-chiselled head and generally aristocratic bearing, pronounced it the inheritor of Arab blood. Maud speedily discovered that riding was the most enjoyable of all human occupations. Down by the river's side, or following long woodland paths, where the busy British rule had planted many an acre with the forests of the future, or out across the wide plains of corn stretching for miles, broken only by clumps of palms or villages nestling each in a little grove under the wing of some ancestral peepul-tree, the moon still shining overhead and the sun just above the horizon, still shrouded in the mists of morning--how fresh, how picturesque, how exhilarating everything looked! How pleasant, too, to go through all these pretty scenes with a companion who seemed somehow to know her tastes and wishes, and to have no thought but how to please her! Sutton, though in public a man of few words and unsatisfactorily taciturn on the subject of his own exploits, had, Maud presently discovered, plenty to tell her when they were alone. The power of observation which made him so nice a judge of character extended itself to all the scene about him and revealed a hundred touches of interest or beauty which, to coarser or less careful vision, would have lain obscure. Maud felt that she had never known how beautiful Nature was till Sutton told her. 'There,' he would say, 'I brought you round this wood that we might not miss that pretty bend of the river, with Humayoun's Tomb and the palms beyond. See what a beautiful blue background the sky makes to the red dome and that nice old bit of crumbling wall. The bright Indian atmospheres have their own beauty, have they not? And see that little wreath of smoke hanging over the village. This is my pet morning landscape.' 'And those peach-groves,' cried Maud, 'all ablaze with blossom, and those delicious shady mulberries and the great stretch of green beyond. It is quite enchanting: a sort of dream of peace.' 'We had a fine gallop across here once,' Sutton said, 'when first we took the Sandy Tracts.' And then Maud learnt that they were riding over a battle-field, and that for a long summer's afternoon men had fought and fallen all along the path where now they stood, and that a battery of artillery had been posted at the very corner of the village to which her guide had brought her. 'I remember when they knocked that hole in the old wall yonder and how all the fellows behind it took to their heels. Then, afterwards we stormed the Tomb and had to finish our fighting by moonlight.' 'Was that when you got your Victoria Cross?' asked Maud, who was possessed by a spirit of insatiable curiosity about Sutton's badges, which he was slow to gratify.