Nameless, they lived for her now. For her now, the Downs, hitherto so void and so spacious under the freedom of the winds and the cycle of the seasons, for her now the Downs were peopled. Their dews were brushed dark with footsteps. Their heights were scanned by searching eyes. Their flanks were bruised by the stumble of weary limbs. Their beech-clumps were threaded with the breath of secrets. She had not known, at first, whether to resent or to welcome the looming-up of this hushed population. It seemed to her that they rose up out of the ground, stealthy, ashen, tall. They were everywhere about her. They had known the Downs as she knew them, and the changing seasons had found as they did for her either a significant echo or an incongruous irony in their souls. Their presence did away with the loneliness, the untouched and indifferent loneliness of the uplands, which in her egoism she had seen as a background to her life and Lovel’s populated only, in so far as they were populated at all, by the rough figures of the men of barbarous ages, men who fought for the simple preservation of their own existence, undivided by any shredding of their moods, whose religion was one of fear and not of charity, the men who had set up the stones and raised the barrows in order to propitiate the dark Unknown of creation and of death with such rude pomp as they could devise. They had been stark, striding elementary figures, one with the tree-trunks and the sarsen stones. They had ennobled the Downs by the record of their constructions. It had seemed to Clare that the intervening centuries between their age and the present day had been blank,--that she inherited the Downs direct from their hands,--those Downs which revealed themselves to her eyes unchanged from the hour when the stone men had passed away from them. The barrows, the dew-ponds, the Grey Wethers, the green tracks, the hawks and the larks, the space,--all unaltered; the stone men, returning, would find no change. What had she said, long ago, to Calladine, “an old, hard country; and such ghosts as there are, are bleached bones by now, dry and clean. I think,” she had said, “that the ghosts that walk among the stones must be as stern as the stones themselves; and that’s my fancy.”