She had nearly reached the end of her journey. The burning land she had left behind her—once the land of her desire—seemed now but a place visited in long evil dreams, where she had undergone unimaginable sufferings during the bondage of sleep. The humid air of England beat upon her face through the open window with a comforting assurance as of waking reality. She had told herself she was travelling with her dead. Never for one hour of her long journey had she forgotten the meaning of that box under Jani’s care. But, with every sunrise that marked a wider distance between her and India, she drew a freer breath. With every stage she felt herself less Lady Gerardine, wife; and more Mrs. English, widow. There was beginning to be an extraordinary restfulness in the sensation. They sped through the New Forest glades, sodden after the rain, now flashing gold-brown with that shaft of sun; now black-green, cavernous, mysterious, where the pines grow close. And then came the moorland stretches, reaching up to a pale-blue cleft in the storm-weighted clouds. How cool it all was! How soft the colours! How benign the wet sky, how different from the metal glare of the land that had betrayed her! And, by-and-by, white gleams of sunshine began to deepen into primroses and ambers; towards the west the sky grew ever clearer, and the leaden wrack, parting, showed an horizon like to a honey sea against the rising mists of evening. How beautiful was England! When they got out at the little country station, in the rural heart of Dorset, the day was closing in. The vault of the heavens brooded over the earth with a cup-like closeness. November though it was, the air struck upon their cheeks as gently as a caress, all impregnated with the fragrance of wet green indefinably touched with the tart accent of decay. Rosamond drew a long deep breath; it had a poignant pleasure in it; tears sprang to her eyes, but, for the first time in God knew how many years, there was a sweetness in them. Jani at her elbow shivered with an aguish chatter of teeth. With one hand she clutched her shawls across her little lean figure; with the other she held on fiercely to a battered tin box. "Oh, Aunt Rosamond," cried Aspasia, ecstatically, as they got into the vehicle awaiting them, "it’s a fly, it’s a fly! Aren’t you glad? Do you smell the musty straw? Oh! doesn’t it bring back good old times? Don’t you wish you may never sit in a state carriage again?"