THE moorland air, warm with its subtle fragrance of gorse--like the scent of peaches when the sun is shining on them--tonic with the faint tang of salt borne by clean winds that had swept across the Atlantic, came to Jean’s nostrils crisp and sparkling as a draught of golden wine. Before her, mile after mile, lay the white road--a sword of civilisation cleaving its way remorselessly across the green wilderness of mossy turf, and on either side rose the swelling hills and jagged peaks of the great tors, melting in the far distance into a vague, formless blur of purple that might be either cloud or tor as it merged at last into the dim haze of the horizon. “Oh, blessed, blessed Moor!” exclaimed Jean. “How I love it! You know, half the people in the world haven’t the least idea what Dartmoor is like. I was enthusing to a woman about it only the other day and she actually said, ‘Oh, yes--Dartmoor. It’s quite flat, I suppose, isn’t it?’ _Flat!_” with sweeping disgust. Burke, his hand on the wheel of the big car which was eating up the miles with the facility of a boa-constrictor swallowing rabbits, smiled at the indignant little sniff with which the speech concluded. “You don’t like dead levels, then?” he suggested. She shook her head. “No, I like hills--something to look up to--to climb.” “Spiritual as well as temporal?” She was silent a moment. “Why, yes, I think I do.” He smiled sardonically. “It’s just that terrible angelic tendency of yours I complain of. It’s too much for any mere material man to live up to. I wish you’d step down to my low level occasionally. You don’t seem to be afflicted with human passions like the rest of us”--he added, a note of irritation in his voice. “Indeed I am!” Jean spoke impulsively, out of the depths of that inner, almost unconscious self-knowledge which lies within each one of us, dormant until some lance-like question pricks it into spontaneous affirmation. She had hardly heeded whither the conversation was tending, and she regretted her frank confession the instant it had left her lips. Burke turned and looked at her with a curious speculation in his glance. “I wonder if that’s true?” he said consideringly. “If so, they’re still asleep. I’d give something to be the one to rouse them.” There was the familiar, half-turbulent quality in his voice--the sound as of something held in leash. Jean sensed the danger in the atmosphere. “You’ll house one of them--the quite ordinary, commonplace one of bad temper, if you talk like that,” she replied prosaically. “You’ve got to play fair, Geoffrey--keep the spirit of the law as well as the letter.” “All’s fair in love and war--as I told you before,” he retorted. “Geoffrey”--indignantly. “Jean!”--mimicking her. “Well, we won’t quarrel about it now. Here we are at our journey’s end. Behold the carriage drive!”