“On and up where nature’s heart
      Beats strong amid the hills.”

As we pass onwards over the cornfields towards a piece of high ground from which it is our wont to watch the sun set, a silvery half-moon peeps out between the clouds.  In the north-west the range of limestone hills is already tinged with purple.  In the highest heaven are bars of distant cloud, so motionless that they appear to be sailing slowly against the wind.  Lower down, dusky, smoke-like clouds, tinged here and there with a rosy hue, are flying rapidly onwards, ever onwards, in the sky.  Later on the higher clouds will turn deep red, whilst brighter and brighter will glow the moon.

Yonder, twenty-five miles away, the old White Horse is just visible upon the distant chalk downs.  Overhead the sky has the deep blue of mazarine, but westwards and south-west the colour is light olive green, gradually changing to an intensely bright yellow.  Heavy banks of clouds are slowly rising in the south-west; the bleating of sheep at the ancient homestead half a mile away is the only sound to be heard.  As the sun goes down to-night it resembles a great ship on fire amidst the breakers on a rockbound coast; for the western sky is dashed with fleecy clouds, like the spray that beats against the chalk cliffs on the shore of the mighty Atlantic; and amid the last plunges of the doomed vessel the spray is tinged redder and redder, ere with her human cargo she disappears amid the surf.  But no sooner has she sunk into the abyss than the foam and the fierce breakers die away, and a wondrous calm broods over all things.  In twenty minutes’ time nothing is left in the western sky but a tiny bar of golden cloud that cannot yet quite die away, reminding me, as I still thought about the burning ship and her ill-fated crew, of

                       “the golden key
     Which opes the palace of Eternity.”

But eastwards, above the old legendary White Horse, the “Empress of the Night,” serene and proudly pale, is driving her car across the darkening skies.

[Illustration:  Ablington Manor 399.png]

CHAPTER XVII.

AUTUMN.

I.

It is in the autumn that life in an old manor house on the Cotswolds has its greatest charm; for one of the chief characteristics of a house in the depths of the country surrounded by a broad manor is the game.  The whole atmosphere of such a place savours of rabbits and hares and partridges.  There may be no pheasant-rearing and comparatively little game of any kind, yet the place is, nevertheless, associated with sport with the gun.  Ten to one there are guns, old and new, hanging up in the hall or the smoking-room, and perhaps fishing-rods too.  There is a bond between the house and the fields around, and the connecting link is the game.  Time was when the squire in these