“This is the only view I care to show you now,” he said at the crest. “There was a better one beyond there. But—it has been defiled.... Those hills!... I knew you would like them. The space of it! And yet——. This view—lacks the shining ponds. There are wonderful distant ponds. After all I must show you the other! But you see there is the high-road, and the high-road has produced an abomination. Along here we go. Now. Don’t look down please.” His gesture covered the foreground. “Look right over the nearer things into the distance. There!” The lady regarded the wide view with serene appreciation. “I don’t see,” she said, “that it’s in any way ruined. It’s perfect.” “You don’t see! Ah! you look right over. You look high. I wish I could too. But that screaming board! I wish the man’s crusts would choke him.” And indeed quite close at hand, where the road curved about below them, the statement that Staminal Bread, the True Staff of Life, was sold only by the International Bread Shops, was flung out with a vigour of yellow and Prussian blue that made the landscape tame. His finger directed her questioning eye. “_Oh!_” said the lady suddenly, as one who is convicted of a stupidity and coloured slightly. “In the morning of course it is worse. The sun comes directly on to it. Then really and truly it blots out everything.” The lady stood quite silent for a little time, with her eyes on the distant ponds. Then he perceived that she was blushing. She turned to her interlocutor as a puzzled pupil might turn to a teacher. “It really is very good bread,” she said. “They make it——Oh! most carefully. With the germ in. And one has to tell people.” Her point of view surprised him. He had expected nothing but a docile sympathy. “But to tell people _here_!” he said. “Yes, I suppose one oughtn’t to tell them here.” “Man does not live by bread alone.” She gave the faintest assent. “This is the work of one pushful, shoving creature, a man named Harman. Imagine him! Imagine what he must be! Don’t you feel his soul defiling us?—this summit of a stupendous pile of—dough, thinking of nothing but his miserable monstrous profits, seeing nothing in the delight of life, the beauty of the world but something that attracts attention, draws eyes, something that gives him his horrible opportunity of getting ahead of all his poor little competitors and inserting—_this!_ It’s the quintessence of all that is wrong with the world;—squalid, shameless huckstering!” He flew off at a tangent. “Four or five years ago they made this landscape disease,—a knight!” He looked at her for a sympathetic indignation, and then suddenly something snapped in his brain and he understood. There wasn’t an instant between absolute innocence and absolute knowledge. “You see,” she said as responsive as though he had cried out sharply at the horror in his mind, “Sir Isaac is my husband. Naturally ... I ought to have given you my name to begin with. It was silly....”