“And let me know when he is coming.  Goodbye.”

The car carried Mr. Hazlewood away still protesting that he really couldn’t think of it for an instant.  But he thought a good deal of it during the next week and his temper did not improve.  “Pettifer has rubbed off the finer edges of his nature,” he said to himself.  “It is a pity—­a great pity.  But thirty years of life in a lawyer’s office must no doubt have that effect.  I regret very much that Pettifer should have imagined that I would condescend to such a scheme.”

CHAPTER XX

ON THE DOWNS

They went up by the steep chalk road which skirts the park wall to the top of the conical hill above the race-course.  An escarpment of grass banks guards a hollow like a shallow crater on the very summit.  They rode round it upon the rim, now facing the black slope of Charlton Forest across the valley to the north, now looking out over the plain and Chichester.  Thirty miles away above the sea the chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight gleamed under their thatch of dark turf.  It was not yet nine in the morning.  Later the day would climb dustily to noon; now it had the wonder and the stillness of great beginnings.  A faint haze like a veil at the edges of the sky and a freshness of the air made the world magical to these two who rode high above weald and sea.  Stella looked downwards to the silver flash of the broad water west of Chichester spire.

“That way they came, perhaps on a day like this,” she said slowly, “those old centurions.”

“Your thoughts go back,” said Dick Hazlewood with a laugh.

“Not so far as you think,” cried Stella, and suddenly her cheeks took fire and a smile dimpled them.  “Oh, I dare to think of many things to-day.”

She rode down the steep grass slope towards the race-course with Dick at her side.  It was the first morning they had ridden together since the night of the dinner-party at Little Beeding.  Mr. Hazlewood was at this moment ordering his car so that he might drive in to the town and learn what Pettifer had discovered in the cuttings from the newspapers.  But they were quite unaware of the plot which was being hatched against them.  They went forward under the high beech-trees watching for the great roots which stretched across their path, and talking little.  An open way between wooden posts led them now on to turf and gave them the freedom of the downs.  They saw no one.  With the larks and the field-fares they had the world to themselves; and in the shade beneath the hedges the dew still sparkled on the grass.  They left the long arm of Halnaker Down upon their right, its old mill standing up on the edge like some lighthouse on a bluff of the sea, and crossing the high road from Up-Waltham rode along a narrow glade amongst beeches and nut-trees and small oaks and bushes of wild roses.  Open spaces came again; below them were the woods and the green country of Slindon and the deep grass of Dale Park.  And so they drew near to Gumber Corner where Stane Street climbs over Bignor Hill.  Here Dick Hazlewood halted.