One Friday morning Speed cycled out to Parminters, a village about three miles out of Millstead. Here there was a low hill (not more than a couple of hundred feet), carpeted with springy turf and overlooking innumerable coils of the glistening stream. At midday on a May morning there was something indescribably restful, drowsy almost, in the scene; the hill dropped by a sudden series of grassy terraces into the meadows, and there was quite a quarter of a mile of lush grass land between the foot of the slope and the river bank. It was an entrancing spectacle, one to watch rather than to see; the silken droop of the meadows, the waves of alternate shadow and sunlight passing over the long grasses, the dark patches on the landscape which drifted eastwards with the clouds. The sun, when it pierced their white edges and came sailing into the blue, was full of warmth and beauty, warmth that awakened myriads of insects to a drowsy buzzing contentment and beauty that lay like a soft veil spread across the world. Speed, with a bundle of four _alpha_ geography essays in his pocket (he had, after all, decided that he was competent to teach commercial geography to the lower forms), lay down amongst the deep grass and lit a pipe. He marked a few of the essays and then, smoking comfortably, settled to a contented gaze across the valley. It was then, not until he had been there some while, though, that he saw amidst the tall grasses of the meadows a splash of blue in the midst of the deep green. It is strange that at first he did not recognise her. He saw only a girl in a pale blue dress stooping to pick grasses. She was hatless and golden-haired, and in one hand she bore a bunch of something purple, some kind of long grass whose name he did not know. He watched her at first exactly as he might have watched some perfect theatrical spectacle, with just that kind of detached admiration and rich impersonal enchantment. The pose of her as she stooped, the flaunt of the grasses in her hand, the movement of her head as she tossed back her laughing hair, the winding yellow path she trampled across the meadows: all these things he watched and strangely admired. He lay watching for a long while, still without guessing who she was, till the sun went in behind a cloud and he felt drowsy. He closed his eyes and leaned back cushioned amongst the turf. V He woke with a sensation of intense chilliness; the sun had gone in and even its approximate position in the sky could not be determined because of the heaviness of the clouds. He looked at his watch; it was ten minutes past one; he must have slept for over an hour.