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The village lay thinly scattered around the wide, grass-grown space; below was the high espaliered garden-wall, and within it, visible through the open doors, a gaunt figure, hook-nosed, like a wizard, at work with the spade, too busily to turn and look. Or was it that he did not hear at all the question repeated thrice: Could one see His Reverence the Prior, at least in his convent church?
A few steps only beyond the firs that stretch their branches, angular, and wild, and white, like forks of lightning, into the air of the ravine, and we are in an arable country of the most perfect richness; the swathes of its corn glowing and burning from field to field: its pretty hamlets all vivid with fruitful orchards, and flowery garden, and goodly with steep-roofed storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard, park-like roads rising and falling from hillside to hillside, or disappearing among brown banks of moss, and thickets of the wild raspberry and rose, or gleaming through lines of tall trees, half glade, half avenue, where the gate opens, or the gateless path turns trustedly aside, unhindered, into the garden of some statelier house, surrounded in rural pride with its golden hives, and carved granaries, and irregular domain of latticed and espaliered cottages, gladdening to look upon in their delicate homeliness delicate, yet in some sort, rude; not like our English homes trim, laborious, formal, irreproachable in comfort but with a peculiar carelessness and largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed loveliness of their country.
This she had consented to do, after discovering that Godfrey Radmore had gone up to London for the day. And then, during their walk, Jack had suddenly made her a pompous offer of marriage! No wonder she smiled mischievously to herself, when pacing slowly up and down the path between a row of espaliered apple trees. She told herself that in a sense it had been her fault.
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