Well, already he had had six and a half hours of it. They had started at 10 and, like any other man, he had enjoyed the drive, though it had been difficult to keep the beastly cart balanced, the girl had had to sit behind with her arm round the other girl who screamed at every oak tree. . . . But he had--if he put himself to the question--mooned along under the absurd moon that had accompanied them down the heaven: to the scent of hay: to the sound of nightingales, hoarse by now, of course--in June he changes his tune; of corncrakes, of bats, of a heron twice, overhead. They had passed the blue-black shadows of corn stacks, of heavy, rounded oaks, of hop oasts that are half church tower, half finger-post. And the road silver grey, and the night warm. . . . It was midsummer night that had done that to him. . . . _Hat mir's angethan. Das war ein schweigsames Reiten._ . . . Not absolutely silent of course: but silentish! Coming back from the parson's, where they had dropped the little London sewer rat, they had talked very little. . . . Not unpleasant people the parson's: an uncle of the girl's: three girl cousins, not unpleasant, like the girl but without the individuality . . . A remarkably good bite of beef: a truly meritorious Stilton and a drop of whisky that proved the parson to be a man. All in candlelight. A motherly mother of the family to take the rat up some stairs . . . a great deal of laughter of girls . . . then a re-start an hour later than had been scheduled. . . . Well, it hadn't mattered: they had the whole of eternity before them: the good horse--_really_ it was a good horse!--putting its shoulders into the work. . . . They had talked a little at first; about the safeness of the London girl from the police now; about the brickishness of the parson in taking her in. She certainly would never have reached Charing Cross by train. . . . There had fallen long periods of silences. A bat had whirled very near their off-lamp. "What a large bat!" she had said. "_Noctilux major_. . ." He said: "Where do you get your absurd Latin nomenclature from? Isn't it _phalœna_ . . ." She had answered: "From White . . . The _Natural History of Selborne_ is the only natural history I ever read. . . ." "He's the last English writer that could write," said Tietjens. "He calls the downs 'those majestic and amusing mountains,'" she said. "Where do you get your dreadful Latin pronunciation from? Phal . . . i . . . i . . . na! To rhyme with Dinah!" "It's '_sublime_ and amusing mountains,' not 'majestic and amusing,'" Tietjens said. "I got my Latin pronunciation, like all public schoolboys of to-day, from the German." She answered: "You would! Father used to say it made him sick." "Cæsar equals Kaiser," Tietjens said. . . . "Bother your Germans," she said, "they're no ethnologists; they're rotten at philology!" She added: "Father used to say so," to take away from an appearance of pedantry.