_The green trees_, _when I saw them first through one of the gates_, _transported and ravished me_; _their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy_,—_they were such strange and wonderful things_. _The skies were mine_, _and so were the sun and moon and stars_,—_and all the world was mine_,—_and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it_. THOMAS TRAHERNE. CHAPTER I MURDERER’S CROSS I ABOVE and beyond the zone of villas, some still white with newly-mixed mortar and the latest unadorned by more than twelve-foot tendrils of ampelopsis or rambling roses, the downs bent their bow to the sky. The horizon loomed so smooth and vast that the plantations of pine and beech which fringed the summits were powerless to break the nobility and purpose of its contour, etched gray-black against the hem of a thunder-cloud that was of the colour of ink. Between the banks a chalk road climbed: an aspiring road, felted in the trodden parts with dust but cross-veined with flinty gutters through which rain poured, like London milk, in stormy weather. A smell of hot earth was in the air. The turf at the wayside was parched and slippery, so that Edwin Ingleby, plodding up the slope, was forced to keep to the white roadway by the slipperiness of his boot-leather. A rather pitiful figure he made, this small boy in an Eton jacket, his waistcoat now unbuttoned and his school cap crumpled in his hot hands. He walked and ran straight upward, as though the devil were at his heels; sometimes looking behind him to see if there were any one in pursuit, sometimes wiping the sweat from his forehead with the crumpled cap. A wagonette, drawn by a pair of horses and burdened with trippers, jolted past him, throwing up a cloud of chalk-dust that made his eyes smart. Inside it swayed seven fat women in black bodices. The guard, who was sufficiently sober, in his own opinion, to ride on the step, was seen to laugh at the dust-smothered boy in the road. “Poor lamb,” said the most motherly of the seven. “Wouldn’t ’e like a lift?” “Gowing the hopposite way, mem,” said the guard. “One of them College lads.” “’Ot ’e looks!” said the lady. “Going to rine kets and dorgs, too.” Edwin Ingleby rubbed the dust out of, or into, his eyes and went plugging on to the top of the ridge where the road dipped through a belt of beeches into the trough between two billows of down, losing itself within high banks of turf which bordered the plough-land, satiny now with bearded wheat and infinitely restful. He sat down on the bank with his feet in the gutter and began to mop up tears with the cap that he had lately used for mopping up sweat. All the time that he was crying, his heart was really full of almost incontinent valour, and that was why his tears made him angry. He began talking to himself:—