It was a still August afternoon, and Roger drove Annette through the sunny countryside. The cool breath of the sea blew softly in their faces, travelling towards them across the low-lying woods and cornfields. For there are few hills in Lowshire. It is a land of long lines: long lines of tidal river and gleaming flats, and immense stretches of clover--clover which is a soft green for half the summer, and then a sea of dim blue pink. The heather and the gorse-land creep almost down among the fields, with here and there a clump of pines taking care of tiny cottages so muffled in the gorse that you can only see the upper windows, or keeping guard round quaint little churches with flint towers. And everywhere in the part of Lowshire where the Rieben winds, there are old bridges of red blue brick shouldering up among the buttercups, and red cows, with here and there a blue one, standing without legs in the long grass. And scattered far apart, down deep blackberried lanes, lie the villages of pink-plastered cottages clustering together, red roof by red roof, with a flinty grey church in the midst. The original artist who designed and painted Lowshire must have always taken a dab of blue in his brush just when he had filled it with red, to do the bridges and the old farms and barns and the cows. For in Lowshire the blues and the reds are always melting into each other like the clover. Roger and Annette were heading towards the sea, and so you would have thought would be their companion the Rieben. But the Rieben was in no hurry. It left them continually to take the longest way, laying itself out in leisurely curves round low uplands, but always meeting them again a few miles farther on, growing more stately with every detour. Other streams swelled it, and presently wharves and townships stretched alongside of it, and ships came sailing by. It hardly seemed possible to Annette that it could be the same little river which one low arch could span at Riff. At last they turned away from it altogether, and struck across the wide common of Gallowscore amid its stretches of yellowing bracken; and Roger showed her where, in past times, a gibbet used to hang, and told her that old Cowell the shepherd, the only man who still came to church in smock-frock and blue stockings, had walked all the way from Riff to Gallowscore, as a lad, to see three highwaymen hanging in chains on it. The great oak had been blown down later, gibbet and all, and the gibbet had never been set up again. A walking funeral was toiling across the bracken in the direction of the church on the edge of the common, and Roger drew up and waited bareheaded till it had passed. And he told Annette of the old iniquitous Lowshire "right of heriot" which came into force when a tenant died, and how his uncle Mr. Manvers, the last lord of the manor, had let it lapse, and how Dick, the present owner, had never enforced it either.