In all seasons and weathers she had known the Downs with him, and like sailors at sea they had accepted the bad with the good, without thought of avoidance. Like all English country people, they disliked extremes of heat as well as extremes of cold; a high summer’s day, when the heat winked along the ridge of the hills, held for them none of that poetic quality it holds for the idle. Their point of view was sober and practical; if feed grew short, they hoped for rain; if the corn in the lowlands were flattened by rain, they hoped for fine weather; it was simple. If the day were a holiday,--that is to say, if Lovel had taken no job,--then they were as content as any other idlers to lie soaked in sun upon the most exposed flank of upland they could find. They would pull the long grass to nibble it down to the juice at the end, or Lovel with a blade of grass drawn taut between his thumbs would shrill the empty air with strange whistlings, or they would tease the ants and small insects by walling them in with a circle of miniature chalk cliffs. Their laughter spread with the song of the larks as fresh and clear as water, and the great spaces lay all around them with the cloud-shadows chasing one another down and over the slopes, and creating in their overhead passage the perpetual variety of mood and colour of the Down-country. Down-country, so temperamental; in halcyon days bright and blithe; candid in its well-being, wholesome in its wind-cleaned delight; yet keeping in the valleys and sweeping folds the deeper shadows which gave it tone like the soberness of some latent melancholy. Upon the heights it would receive the sun, and glitter and rejoice like a woman in love, but the cup of the valleys was deep with a greater richness, with remembrance, and foreboding. So, although simple and large in outline, the country,--to Clare and Lovel personal, not inanimate,--was not simple with a shallow or trivial simplicity; not the simplicity of ignorance or emotional poverty; but with a wisdom that still had the courage to be gay,--the reckless gaiety of the profoundly tragic. No monotony was possible over that landscape of sunburnt tan, of blue distances, and stains of a lowering purple. No monotony, no sentimentality; the moods all visible at once over the range of country, all definite and certain of their intention, whether the naked sunburnt heights, or the brooding plunge of shadow.