Tallyn Hall was eight miles from Beechcote. The ladies were to drive, but in order to show Mrs. Colwood something of the country, Diana decreed that they should walk up to the downs by a field path, meeting the carriage which bore their luggage at a convenient point on the main road. The day was a day of beauty--the trees and grass lightly rimed, the air sparkling and translucent. Nature was held in the rest of winter; but beneath the outward stillness, one caught as it were the strong heart-beat of the mighty mother. Diana climbed the steep down without a pause, save when she turned round from time to time to help her companion. Her slight firm frame, the graceful decision of her movements, the absence of all stress and effort showed a creature accustomed to exercise and open air; Mrs. Colwood, the frail Anglo-Indian to whom walking was a task, tried to rival her in vain; and Diana was soon full of apologies and remorse for having tempted her to the climb. "Please!--please!"--the little lady panted, as they reached the top--"wasn't this worth it?" For they stood in one of the famous wood and common lands of Southern England--great beeches towering overhead--glades opening to right and left--ferny paths over green turf-tracks, and avenues of immemorial age, the highways of a vanished life--old earth-works, overgrown--lanes deep-sunk in the chalk where the pack-horses once made their way--gnarled thorns, bent with years, yet still white-mantled in the spring: a wild, enchanted no-man's country, owned it seemed by rabbits and birds, solitary, lovely, and barren--yet from its furthest edge, the high spectator, looking eastward, on a clear night, might see on the horizon the dim flare of London. Diana's habitual joy broke out, as she stood gazing at the village below, the walls and woods of Beechcote, the church, the plough-lands, and the far-western plain, drawn in pale grays and purples under the declining sun. "Isn't it heavenly!--the browns--the blues--the soberness, the delicacy of it all? Oh, so much better than any tiresome Mediterranean--any stupid Riviera!--Ah!" She stopped and turned, checked by a sound behind her. Captain Roughsedge appeared, carrying his gun, his spaniel beside him. He greeted the ladies with what seemed to Mrs. Colwood a very evident start of pleasure, and turned to walk with them. "You have been shooting?" said Diana. He admitted it. "That's what you enjoy?" He flushed. "More than anything in the world." But he looked at his questioner a little askance, as though uncertain how she might take so gross a confession. Diana laughed, and hoped he got as much as he desired. Then he was not like his father--who cared so much for books? "Oh, books!" He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, the fact is, I--I don't often read if I can help it. But of course they make you do a lot of it--with these beastly examinations. They've about spoiled the army with them." "You wouldn't do it for pleasure?"