He had no reason to change his mind as he assisted her in picking the berries, an operation which brought his head so close to hers that one of the strands of her hair brushed his cheek. Her quick gesture restoring the truant to place prolonged the thrill that had proceeded from the point of contact, with an intimation of self-consciousness on her part as well as on his. Helen was picking, too, but always on the other side of the basket. At length she left off in order to answer questions about her mother and affairs at home in France, which Mrs. Sanford had foreborne asking at tea. When the basket was filled the vicar planned to show Phil the graves of his ancestors in the little churchyard, but Henriette forestalled him with the suggestion that the younger generation take a walk before dinner. "Aren't you coming?" she called to Helen as she started toward the gate with Phil. "No. I'll stay with uncle and aunt," said Helen hesitatingly. "Seventeenth cousins from America don't appear often," Phil put in, perhaps a bit luke-warmly. Helen shook her head. "Oh, please, that's a good mouse!" urged Heinriette. "No!" said Helen, a sharpness in her voice unlike Heinriette's now and a flash of what seemed pent-up irritation in her eyes. It was not an agreeable exhibition, Phil thought. But Henriette smiled as if accustomed to such outbreaks, explaining in an aside: "Train-riding always tires her. You mustn't mind her abruptness. She has more fire, is more French, than I am." They had gone only a few steps when Helen ran after them. She was flushed, with a singular, penitent look in her eyes, and the voice of Henriette might have been continuing softly as she said: "Please, I didn't mean to be tempery. But I had planned to do something and I'll arrange the flowers for the table." "You are always together, quite inseparable, you and Helen," said Phil, after they were through the gate. "Yes. Isn't it lucky to have a sister only a year apart from you?" said Henriette. "We're quite different, but surely you've noted the resemblance in our voices. I have tried to change mine and she has tried to change hers, for there was something uncanny about it, but neither of us could quite. It's been a greater cross to mother than to us, though I can't see, why when we are so different in other ways, can you?" He could not when Henriette's wonderful eyes were putting the question to him at the same time as her lips, in a way that made the difference a contrast. "I'll show you my favourite walk," she said. It took them into a lane and on high ground, where the village lay nestling at their feet, a greyish patch in the pattern-work of hedges. The beauty of the landscape to him was in its suggestion, no less than in its appeal to the eye. Many generations of men had laid their bones in this earth after having given it their strength in return for life.