"But all the same," she remarked meditatively as they drove on, "I like the lad for't. 'Tisn' everyone would do so much for the sake of an old 'ooman that never has a good word to fling at nobody, and maybe spanked 'en blue when he was a tacker and went to school wi' her. He's terrible simple; and decent, too, for a sailor. I reckon there's a many think Mother Butson hardly used that wouldn't crack their backs for her as he's a-doing." "He spoke to me," said Hester, "quite as if I were doing a wickedness in coming--as if, at least, I were selfish and unjust. And I never heard of this Mother Butson till half an hour ago! Do _you_ think I'm unjust?" "Well," Nuncey answered judiciously, "if any person had asked me that an hour ago, I'd have agreed with Tom. But 'tis different now I've seen your face." Nuncey and the stationmaster were wise weather prophets. Here on the uplands the grey veil of morning fell apart, and dissolved so suddenly that before Hester had time to wonder the miracle was accomplished. A flood of sunshine broke over the ripening cornfields to right and left; the song of larks rang forth almost with a shout; beyond the golden ridges of the wheat the grey vapour faded as breath off a mirror, and lo! a clear line divided the turquoise sky from a sea of intensest iris-blue. As she watched the transformation her heart gave a lift, and the past few hours fell from her like an evil dream. The stuffy compartment, the blear-eyed lamp, the train's roar and rattle, the forlorn arrival on the windy platform--all slipped away into a remote past. She had passed the gates of fear and entered an enchanted land. As she looked abroad upon it she marvelled at a hundred differences between it and her native Midlands. It was wilder--infinitely wilder--than Warwickshire, and at the same time less unkempt; far more savage in outline, yet in detail sober almost to tidiness. It seemed to acknowledge the hand of some great unknown gardener; and this gardener was, of course, the sea-breeze now filling her lungs and bracing her strength. The shaven, landward-bending thorns and hollies, the close-trimmed hedgerow, the clean-swept highroad, alike proclaimed its tireless attentions. It favoured its own plants, too--the tamarisk on the hedge, the fuchsia and myrtle in the cottage garden. As the spring-cart nid-nodded down the hill towards Troy, the grey roofs of the town broke upon Hester's sight beyond a cloud of fuchsia blossoms in a garden at the angle of the road.