Luke continued making ineffectual dives into the hole, while she watched him gleefully. He went to the hedge and breaking off a dusty sprig of woundwort prodded the ring with its stalk. “You can’t do it” she cried, “you can’t do it! You’ll only push it further in!” “Damn you, Annie!” he muttered. “This is a horrible kind of joke. I tell you, Gladys will want this confounded thing back tomorrow. She’s already asked me twice for it. She only gave it to me for fun.” The girl leaned across the stone towards him, propping herself on the palms of her hands, and laughing mischievously. “No one in this village can get that ring out of there!” she cried; “no one! And when they does, they’ll find it all twisted up with my hair!” She tossed back her black locks defiantly. Luke Andersen’s thoughts ran upon scissors, pincers, willow-wands, bramble-thorns, and children’s arms. “Leave it then!” he said. “After all, I can swear I lost it. Come on, you little demon!” They moved away; and St. Catharine’s church was only striking the hour of nine, when they separated at her mother’s door. CHAPTER XV MORTIMER ROMER The incredibly halcyon June which had filled the lanes and meadows of Nevilton that summer with such golden weather, gave place at last to July; and with July came tokens of a change. The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn with their little lines of brown mown grass waiting its hour of “carrying,” but the larger number of the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and yet curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when they have been shorn of their first harvest. The corn in the arable-lands was beginning to stand high; wheat and barley varying their alternate ripening tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the diaphanous glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the other. In the hedges, rag-wort, knapweed and scabious had completely replaced wild-rose and elder-blossom; and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds, loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. Even the latest-sprouting among the trees carried now the full heavy burden, dark and monotonous, of the summer’s prime; and the sharp, dry intermittent chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more flute-like cries of the earlier-nesting birds. The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, with their thick entangled undergrowth, were less pleasant to walk in than they had been. Tall rank growths choked the wan remnants of the season’s first prime; and beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the dry, hard-trodden paths lost their furtive enchantment. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the under-shadows, was no more now than a gross mass of tarnished leaves. Enchanter’s night-shade took the place of pink-campion; only to yield, in its turn, to viper’s bugloss and flea-bane.