Between photographs of a gamekeeper, whose face was like a furze bush with eyes in it, and a card of mourning for Jane Mary Sims, aged seventy-three, hung a picture seeming to have little to do with either. It was of a high-born and well-dressed lady with regular features and graceful, mature figure sitting beside a cradled child. She was bending over towards the child, and her face, though composed, was sorrowful. Had she looked up she would have seen an unusual sight, and it was a mercy that she did not, for it would have certainly upset her composure through astonishment and fear. For not many feet from her was the head of a human being who was coming towards her head foremost through the window, or more probably the ceiling. I say a human being because her body--it was a mature and athletic, slender lady--was of the same general form, size, and proportions as those of our own species, and she wore the clinging night-dress so much favoured by the visionary artist. But she had wings attached to her shoulders, not large enough to be of any use, supposing her to have learned their management, but sufficient to make part of a becoming fancy dress or fairy dancing costume. She had apparently dived from some height, and in a bewitching attitude was making straight for the cradle. As she was no Ariel’s sister capable of playing “i’ th’ plighted clouds,” the danger both to her and to the cradle was great. She faced it with no sign of fear, her soft eyes and her even and not too full lips expressing a mind in tranquillity and scarcely, if at all, stirred by expectation or surmise. There was no sequel to this daring but painful picture, nor, of course, any explanation. It was, I should say, the fancy of a genius who had mingled the common and the improbable in dreams produced by opium or other drug. CHAPTER VIII SIXTH DAY--WATLINGTON TO UPTON, BY EWELME, WALLINGFORD, LITTLE STOKE, THE PAPIST WAY, LOLLINGDON, ASTON, AND BLEWBURY