After six weeks at Halberton the Considines moved into the Rectory at Lapton, a square, solid building, endowed with luxuriant creepers and protected on the side that faced the prevailing wind and the roadway, with a covering of hung slates. On the three other sides lay a garden which had been too much for Canon Harrow and his gardener Hannaford. Both of them had been old and withered, and the tremendous vitality of the green things that grew in that rich red soil had overcome all their efforts at repression so that the house had been besieged and choked with vegetation and mildewed with the dampness of rain and sap. It was all very lush and generous and cool, no doubt, in summer; but when the rain that drove in from the Channel glistened on the hung slates and dripped incessantly from myriads of shining leaves, the Rector of Lapton Huish might as well have been living in a tropical swamp. To the north of them, the huge masses of Dartmoor stole the air, so that their life seemed to be lost in a windless eddy, and in the deep valleys with which the country was scored the air lay dead for many months at a time. Gabrielle, accustomed to the free spaces of Connemara, felt the change depressing, though she would not admit it; indeed, she had far too many things to think about to have time for speculating on her own health. First of all the callers. At Roscarna the reputation of Jocelyn and, above all, his relations with Biddy Joyce, had saved the Hewishes from these formalities; and the great distances that separated the houses of gentlefolk in the west of Ireland would have made hospitality a more spontaneous and less formal affair in any case. In Devon, as Gabrielle soon discovered, calling was a ritual complicated by innumerable shades of social finesse. Lady Halberton had already coached her in the list of people whom she must know, people she could safely know at a distance, and people whom it was her duty to discourage. As soon as she was settled in at Lapton the county descended on her and she was overwhelmed with visitors from all three classes.