But that was in October, and she had not seen him again for any private conversation, however evasive. Autumn had gone, winter had come, with the violence and completeness to which dwellers on those uplands were accustomed. Snow blocked the roads. Communication with Marlborough was cut off, the inhabitants of King’s Avon resigned themselves to rely upon their own store of provisions, the Downs lay around them, white and enormous. They did not resent their isolation, but accepted it, almost yearly, as coming in its turn in the nature of things. It imprisoned them, more than ever self-contained, in their cup within the earthwork, with their pagan stones, their Christian church, their shops, and their Manor House, where Mr. Warrener was now their only representative of gentry; snugly a homogenous community. Lovel alone saw in the snow something more than a mere barrier against the outside world, a barrier that was almost a defence; he saw the stones standing up black out of a white field, the black trees powdered and spangled; he knew that he could go up on to the Downs without the fear of meeting any stranger riding there for pleasure. He could look from the crest of the White Horse Hill out over the country, without seeing the roads of civilisation, without seeing the White Horse itself, and his shepherd’s hut was as rough a shelter as primitive man would have devised. He took a certain pleasure in the discomfort and severity of his winter life. Often he would be the only man to leave the village of a morning, passing out on his way to the uplands while a few isolated figures trudged up the draughty street against the blizzard with sacks thrown round their shoulders, going to their cowsheds or to clear a space for their poultry; but Lovel passed them, leaving them to such domestic occupations, and sought the high lands, where wind and sleet swept across like aerial cavalry, and the driven snow was banked deep in drifts against the scars and scoops of the hillsides. Here, as he stood alone with the spears of the weather driving through him, he had a sense of triumph: he had got the better of the Downs, he had got the better of his own soul. His physical and mental endurance were alike strong enough to cope with the utmost rigours that Nature and fate were able to devise for his trial. This grim satisfaction, he felt, was the last luxury he permitted himself to indulge. For the rest, he had stripped himself bare of soft superfluities as a man could be; down to bone and sinew he had stripped himself. At times, in his moments of strange, harsh exaltation, when the gale screamed most piteously around him, he wished he might divest himself of his clothing, outward symbol of protection, and stand naked to support the lashings of the wind and the frozen hail; he thought proudly that no harm would come of it to his lean body. But although he never allowed himself to exploit the desires of this fanatical folly, he knew that