They climbed down hand in hand, and regaining their cropping steeds, mounted and rode on. It took them no long while to cover the remaining distance, and by two o’clock they were entering into the first of the track which led towards the Moated Grange. As they drew near the point where its chimneys would first come into sight, a flutter of emotions arose in Brion’s breast. How was he returning, and to what, after six months’ silence and separation from these old familiar scenes? And with a wife no one of them knew or guessed? A sudden shyness of the explanatory rôle he had to play, in the midst of welcome and excitement, seized on him like a paralysis. Yet he felt no doubt as to Joan’s reception: they would all love her for his sake, and not least his Uncle, to whom her gentle winsome presence would appeal like sunshine breaking out of long storm. The afternoon was very still and hazy, with a curious vaporous closeness in it, which seemed to meet their faces in hot whiffs, as when one stands near a wind-swayed bonfire. Brion sniffed, raising his head. ‘What is that?’ said he. ‘Are they burning heather? My faith, it is sultry here; and the insects they so hum and drone, one might be in a wood instead of the open. And yet ’tis not like insects neither.’ The murmur, or clamour, whatever it was, appeared all in front of them, and to swell in volume as they advanced. They could see nothing beyond the sloping track before them, and the trees which topped it. As they reached these, Brion pulled on his rein, bidding his companion stop. ‘Listen!’ he said. The noise, with their reaching the level ground, had sensibly increased, as when a swell is opened in an organ. Busy, multitudinous, inarticulate, it seemed as if compounded of a confusion of human voices, and cracking whips, and hissing kettles, their shrill spasmodic utterance perpetually punctuating a dull booming roar which never ceased; but all in a minor key, as though subdued by distance, and the closeness of the high trees which here shut in the track. ‘What is it, Brion?’ whispered the girl fearfully. Something caught the tail of his eye, and he looked up to see a drift of what he could not mistake scudding over the tree-tops. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. His face was suddenly set like death. ‘Stay where you are, Joan, while I go and see.’