After this they had wonderful times together. In the mornings Edwin would indulge his glorious idleness among the books of the dining-room shelves, and after middle-day dinner, when his father had gone back to the shop, he would set out with his mother up the lane under the tall elms and through the sloping field that led to the mill pond. They did not walk very far because she must not be over-tired; but the field was so crowded with wonders that they were tempted further. Cowslips steeped the meadows in their vinous perfume; and between the saplings of the hazel copse they saw the sheeted hyacinths gleaming like pools that mirror the sky in open places. Beyond the land of meadows and copses they came to a belt of the old forest, through which they could see up a broad green lane to the very shoulders of the hills: Pen Beacon heaving its fleece of black firs, and the domed head of Uffdown. His mother would sigh a little when she saw the hills. In weather that threatened rain from the west they would seem so near, with their contour hard against the watery sky and the cloud shadows all prussian blue. “Oh, I should love to be there, Edwin,” she would say. “Can’t we walk there some day, dearest?” “It’s such a terrible drag up. We should both be dreadfully tired.” “Oh, I wish we could, mother; I do wish we could.” The day of their last walk together, when they came to the end of the green lane and were sitting on the gate, she jumped down on the far side and set off walking up the track. “Come along, Eddie,” she said, “I’m going up to Uffdown.” “Oh, mother,” he cried. “Isn’t it too far? I should like to carry you!” And half-doubting, but fearfully eager for adventure, they set off together. As they climbed upward it seemed that the air grew sweeter every moment, and when they had left the wood behind them they came out on to a stony lane with a surface of grit veined by the tracks of storm-water, and on either side banks of tufted grass along which gorse was swaying in the breeze. And here the clouds seemed to be racing close above their heads, all dazzling white, and the blue in which they moved was deep and limpid. Mrs. Ingleby’s gray-green eyes were full of laughter and her face flushed with the climb. “Oh, mother,” Edwin panted, “what an awful lick you go! Hadn’t we better sit down a bit?” “And catch cold! You careless boy. We’ll get to the top soon now.” “But you mustn’t tire yourself.” She laughed at him. “Oh, this air is wonderful,” she said. “Just as if it had come straight out of the blue, all washed and clean.” On the top of Uffdown where the cloak of pine droops to a hollow between the two peaks, they sat on a dry, yielding hedge-side, where the grass was thick as the fleece of a mountain sheep, and four lovely counties dreamed below them. “Eddie,” she asked, half joking, “where does the west wind come from?” Edwin was willing to instruct. “Oh, I don’t know, dearest—from Wales and the sea, I suppose.”