Yet for these what exquisite consolation! Exhilaration of frost, peace of still days swung on a soft, low wind, inspiration of light and shade and mist and evening sun. She learned, too, to look on the rain as a dominant personality ruling great issues. At Halsted, after scorching days of tennis, a healing drizzle soft as down, blotting out the day and whispering through the night, brought no comment except--“Filthy weather! Shut it out!”--but here they said of it: “It’s doing rarely--coming down nicely--doing grand!” thinking in the dark of tarns filling in the lonely hills, and listening to the drinking earth with a sense of personal benefit, and almost of personal achievement. And when the big winds came, so that the lights quivered and the beds shook and the carpets flapped like bunting, you did not say, as at Halsted: “Just the night for ‘Everybody’s Doing It’--what? Somebody order the closed car!” but you wondered under which hedge the sheep had gathered, and whether the tide was over the road at Sandfoot, and if, by some miracle of endurance, the frail old ash would live till morning. Moreover, the country sense of clannish commonness in so much took her by degrees, giving her whole new world into her hand. “I believe I’m beginning to understand,” she said to Hamer, one day when the mood of analysis was upon her. “I know now why old James was so angry when we cut down that sycamore, just after we came. Why, I could hate the whole District Council for pulling down the ferny old wall at Abbey Corner, just because you and I ran round it into the Chairman! Everything seems to get up close to you in the country and make a personal matter of itself without being asked. Haven’t you noticed how people say, ‘Oh, the harvest is all in, with _us_!’ or, ‘_We_ did splendidly in roots!’ even if they own nothing but an ivy-strangled cottage with a lean-to henpen and a border of nasturtiums? It grows on you, somehow. Everybody does it. Why, only last week, when those horrid cousins of mother’s motored through, and did nothing but grumble about the Westmorland butter, I found myself saying: ‘It can’t have been local. _Ours_ has been winning all over the place!’ just as if I’d been raising prize pats on my own account, instead of Harriet and Mrs. Wilson!” “It’s great!” Hamer answered, irrelevantly but comprehensively, as he had answered, months before. He had a fat book or two in his arm. “Doing anything this evening, Dandy Anne? I’m going over to Wild Duck with these, and I thought of bringing Knewstubb back with me.”