AT sunrise she shut the cottage door behind her, locked it, and put the key in a hiding-place under the eaves, then went down the path between the daffodils and out of the little gate. She had a basket upon her arm and within it in a blue jar a honeycomb for a gift to Mistress Borrow. It was a morning fresh and fragrant, the grass diamonded with last night’s rain, the tree-tops veiled with mist, distant cocks crowing. When she came upon the road the sun was drinking up the mist; it was going to be a beautiful day. She walked for some distance toward the village, but at a point where she saw Carthew House among the trees and the church yews were growing large before her, she turned into a path that would take her through the fields and bring her out upon the highway with the village left behind. She did not wish to go through the village, she did not wish to pass Alison Inch’s door, she did not wish to come near to Carthew House. She walked between the springing grain, and through a copse where a thrush was singing, and by a stream that was the same that murmured past the Oak Grange, and so at last came back to the highway. She looked back. The village roofs, the church tower, rested dark against the blue sky; light curls of smoke were rising and a great bird sailed overhead. Before her, over hill and dale, ran the road to the town. She shifted her basket to the other arm and walked on in the golden morning. Now she was by nature courageous, and by nature also a lover of light and air, of form and colour, of diverse motion and the throb of life. In her soul the whole round earth mirrored itself as alive, and, despite black moods and fits of madness, as dominantly good and fair. What of sorrow, gloom, and care had of late clung about her, what of terror and horror the happening of the evening before had left with her, slowly lessened, grew diaphanous in the sunlight and open country. The road began to entertain her, and there came sweet wafted memories of the castle wood, of how fondly she and her father and uncle had lived together and understood one another and liked life, and of all the pleasant doings when the great family were at the castle. Music hummed in her ears again, the figures of the masque filed across the green sward.