These pleasing duties done, they set out briskly for the Hall, along the field path. It was just not freezing. The air blew round them crisp and cool and stinging, and sang in the bare beech woods that their path skirted. Above them white clouds sailed about a blue sky. The brown earth was full of a repressed yet vigorous joy. Eddy and Daphne swung along quickly through fields and lanes. Eddy felt the exuberance of the crisp weather and the splendid earth tingle through him. It was one of the many things he loved, and felt utterly at home with, this motion across open country, on foot or on horse-back. Daphne, too, felt and looked at home, with her firm, light step, and her neat, useful stick, and her fair hair blowing in strands under her tweed hat, and all the competent, wholesome young grace of her. Daphne was rather charming, there was no doubt about that. It sometimes occurred to Eddy when he met her after an absence. There was a sort of a drawing-power about her that was quite apart from beauty, and that made her a popular and sought-after person, in spite of her casual manners and her frequent selfishnesses. The young men of the neighbourhood all liked Daphne, and consequently she had a very good time, and was decidedly spoilt, and, in a cool, not unattractive way, rather conceited. She seldom had any tumbles mortifying to her self-confidence, partly because she was in general clever and competent at the things that came in her way to do, and partly because she did not try to do those she would have been less good at, not from any fear of failure, but simply because she was bored by them. But a clergyman’s daughter, even a dean’s, has, unfortunately, to do a few things that bore her. One is bazaars. Another is leaving things at cottages. Mrs. Oliver had given them a brown paper parcel to leave at a house in the lane. They left it, and Eddy stayed for a moment to talk with the lady of the house. Master Eddy was generally beloved in Welchester, because he always had plenty of attention to bestow even on the poorest and dullest. Miss Daphne was beloved, too, and admired, but was usually more in a hurry. She was in a hurry to-day, and wouldn’t let Eddy stay long. “If you let Mrs. Tom Clark start on Tom’s abscess, we should never get to the Hall to-day,” she said, as they left the cottage. “Besides, I hate abscesses.” “But I like Tom and his wife,” said Eddy.