“Who is the landlord of this good tavern?” said he. “George Pollack, sir; and I am his granddaughter, at your service.” “Would you were. And what is your name, my pretty maid?” “Elizabeth, I was christened,” said she; “and Betty am I called.” His last words suggesting an old nursery rhyme--“And what is your fortune, my pretty maid?” he could not help murmuring. “Self-possession,” said she with a smile, and whisked out of the room. CHAPTER V. Mr. Tuke had ridden a mile along the last lap of his journey, when he suddenly drew himself together, gave a whistle, and set to communing audibly with his inner man. “This will not do, Roberto,” he murmured. “Thou hast eaten of the dangerous fruit, and the sweet poison courses in thy veins.” He shrugged out a laugh. “Why, what has my drugged headpiece been conscious of since I left the inn?--whereat I dwelt a pernicious while, by the way. The wind whistles ‘Betty Pollack’--the lark twitters ‘Betty Pollack’--she smiles over the hedgerows; she sits on every stile; the rose of the sun looks through the grey welkin like the fire of untouched maidenhood in her delicate cheeks. And I am a squire of acres--a man of substance; and a good man prospective, I believe.” He laughed again, flicked his horse to a canter, and broke into a fragment of the old-world song that seemed queerly inapt to his character-- Sweet sun, sweet air, and a pilgrim’s scrip; Shoon to my feet and sword on hip; Flout or kiss on a ready lip, And the green by-ways of the world-a! His voice rang down the lonely swales and made their austerity human. For a profound silence reigned on all the hills and in the valleys by way of his passing, and the wind had ceased to cry of its own desolation. Still no change marked the aspect of the country he traversed. Downs--endless downs, with, occasionally, a wryed plume of beech-trees on the peak of a slope; occasionally, a row of white stones in the cleft of a hillside, as if Nature, like some disturbed beast, were setting her teeth for a snarl. At the end of another mile, it came as a breathing relief to him, upon topping a long incline, to see its downward pitch break away into a spread of meadow-land, whereafter began trees, at first singly or in clumps; further, in copses and little shaws, until the distance rolled with their billowing in fair, modulated waves. The sight brought a cluck of satisfaction from him, for he was not made for loneliness; and he paused to drink in the glad prospect. Indeed, he had come to think that his acres would prove but barren sheep-runs, and his house but a magnified shepherd’s cottage on a swept table of pasturage, till this good view opened out to reassure him.