The landlady arrived in a flurry, asking what they would please to order, and Adrian and she kept up a brisk dialogue for the next five minutes. Finally, it was decided that they should have chops. Perhaps the discussion satisfied some traditional sense of what was the right thing to do on arriving at an inn. There was nothing to have _but_ the chops which Adrian had chosen, and he murmured something of "fixed fate, free-will" under his moustache, as he crossed the road in the direction of the church. "In an hour," he said. "That will give us time to see the church and the village. Then, after luncheon, we will go to the old Place, and the fly shall call for us there, and take us back the short way. Will that do, Barbara?" Of course it would do; and when they reached the churchyard she bade him wait a moment and she would get the key. The stony path to Mrs. Spearman's cottage was curiously familiar--the broken palings, the pump, the leafless alder-bush. The only difference was that it was Barbara Scarlett--a different person--who was stepping over the rough pebbles. She returned to Adrian, who was leaning against the gate-post. "Mitchelhurst isn't very beautiful," he said, with an air of conviction. "I thought I remembered it, but it has come upon me rather as a shock. Somehow, I fancied--Barbara, is it possible that I have taken all the beauty out of it--that it belongs to _me_ now, instead of to Mitchelhurst? Can that be?" She smiled her answer to the question, and then-- "I think it looks very much as usual," she said, gazing dispassionately round. "Of course, it is prettier in the spring--or in the summer. It was summer when you came, you know." She had a vague recollection of having pleaded the cause of Mitchelhurst at some other time in the same way, which troubled her a little. "Yes, I know it was summer," said Adrian. "But still----" "You mustn't say anything against Mitchelhurst," cried Barbara, swinging her great key. "It isn't beautiful, but I feel as if I belonged to it, somehow. It changed me, I can't tell why or how, but it did. After I had been six months with Uncle Hayes, I went home for a fortnight in the spring, and everything seemed so different. It was all so bright and busy there, everybody talked so fast about little everyday things, and the rooms were so small and crowded. I suppose it was because I had been living with echoes and old pictures in that great house. Louisa and Hetty were always having little secrets and jokes, there wasn't any harm in them, you know, but I felt as if I could not care about them or laugh at them, and yet some of them had been my jokes, before I went to Mitchelhurst. And I could not make them understand why I cared about the Rothwells and their pictures, when I had never known any of them." "Louisa is a very nice girl," said Scarlett; "but if Mitchelhurst is all the difference between you two, I am bound to say that I have a high opinion of the place."