The girl drew a deep breath. Unconsciously, she was registering it all. All the grey monotones, all the myriad little drips and splashings, all the washed leaves and grasses around and underfoot, and all the tall upreaching brown trunks that rose against the teeming sky, were impressing themselves upon her mind. She knew it as an instinct and stood there to miss nothing. And one day Ursula Manning would paint just such a picture, and people would wonder how she did it, and the critics talk of her unique gift. But at the quarry she turned to the left. The high soaked grasses reached to her knees; last year's litter of leaves clung to her feet; sprays of bramble clutched at her short skirt; but she moved slowly and persistently on. Her eyes, that looked at you always without a tremor, glanced quietly right and left as she went. By field-path and coppice, and now in a sunken lane that skirted an old wall behind which rose Fordham Manor, she made her way. She was drenched through and through, but it was warm rain, and besides the exercise kept her warm. The pores of her skin, like those of the woods and the plants, opened to the joyous quickening benison of it. Rain dripped from her plaited hair and shone on her face. And still she moved steadily through it, with the erect carriage and proud swing of her, and those resolute eager eyes. Just past the old wall, where it turns to run up to the coach-house and stables and barns against which fruitful ancient fig-trees grow, she crossed a field diagonally to her left. Its boundary hedge was thick and she moved along to the right seeking an opening. Not until she was all but at the corner did she find it, and there, pushing back a tangle of old man's beard and bryony, she leapt through and out on to the carriage-drive running by the park up to the house. And just then a car turned the corner and swept past her. There were three men in it besides the driver. One sat next him, his hat pulled down, muffled in an overcoat, but she knew him. Of the others, one turned and waved cheerfully over the back as the car went on. She knew him, too, just as she knew that he was arriving that day to stay with Mr. Tressor. The third man she did not know. She smiled suddenly to herself. It was plain they had been caught in the open car by the sudden storm, driving up from Brighton probably. What fun! Her cousin hated rain. Manning turned back to Paul. "My cousin Ursula," he said. "She lives just here, when she's not in town. Possibly you know the name. She paints, and has rather a growing reputation." "Oh," said Paul. "What in the world was she doing out in this then? She looked drowned." "I know. She loves that sort of thing. I wonder what you'll think of her, Paul." "Why?" "I don't know. She's rather unusual. Not your sort at all I should imagine. But--well, I don't know. It will be rather amusing to see." (2)