At the foot of the Downs, along whose base the highway road wound, Geoffrey had paused to take counsel of a carter, who had just descended with a load of flints, before venturing across the all-but-trackless hills. The man very civilly stopped his waggon and named the various landmarks by which he would have guided his own course to Andrew Fisher's. Geoffrey had started early in the evening, intending to go all the way to Warren House, for he carried with him the rug (strapped to the saddle) which Margaret and May had forgotten, and for which the rude old man had written. This rug, which Mrs Estcourt gave him, was in fact his passport, for he scarcely knew how Margaret would take his coming to fetch her in that rather abrupt way. Guessing what the man meant more by the slant of his whip than his words, he turned off the road on to the sward, and ascended the hill. A long narrow shadow of man and horse, disproportionately stretched out, raced before him along the slope. The hoofs of the grey hardly cut the firm turf, dry with summer heat; the vivid green of spring had already gone, and a faint brown was just visible somewhere in the grass. Dark boulder stones--sarsens--bald and smooth, thrust their shoulders out of the sward here and there; hollowed out into curious cuplike cavities, in which, after a shower, the collected raindrops remained imprisoned in tiny bowls hard as the fabled adamant of mediaeval story. Round white bosses--white as milk, and globular like cannon-shot--dotted the turf, fungi not yet ripened into the dust of the puff-ball. Now and again the iron shoes dashed an edible mushroom to pieces, turning the pink gills upwards to shrivel and blacken in the morrow's sun. The bees rose with a shrill buzz from the white clover, which is the shepherd's sign of midsummer. Swiftly the grey sped along the slopes, the shadow racing before grew longer and fainter as the beams of the sun came nearly horizontally. Already the ridges cast a shadow into the hollows--into the narrow coombes, where great flints and chalk fragments had rolled down and strewed the ground as with the wreck of a titanic skirmish. Thickets of green furze tipped with yellow bloom, and beneath, peeping out, the pale purple heath-flower. On the stunted hawthorn bushes standing alone, stern sentinels in summer's heat and winter's storm, green peggles hardening, which autumn would redden and ripen for the thrush. Odorous thyme and yellow-bird's-foot lotus embroidering the grassy carpet; wide breadths of tussocky grass, tall and tough, which the sheep had left untouched, and where the hare crouched in her form, hearkening to the thud of the hoofs.