Nan smiled.

“Do you think I’ll be so bad to live with, then?”

“’Tisn’t so much that you’ll be bad with intent.  But you’re that Varincourt woman’s own great-grand-daughter.  Not that ye can help it, and I’m no blamin’ ye for it.  But ’tis wild blood!”

Nan rose, laughing, and kissed her aunt.

“After such a snub as that, I think I’d better take myself off.  It’s really time I started, as I’m walking.”

“Let me run you back in the car,” suggested Sandy eagerly.

“No, thanks.  I’m taking the short cut home through the woods.”

Sandy accompanied her down the drive.  At the gates he stopped abruptly.

“Nan,” he said quietly.  “Is it quite O.K. about your engagement?  You’ll be really happy with Trenby?”

Nan paused a moment.  Then she spoke, very quietly and with a touch of cynicism quite foreign to the fresh, sweet outlook upon life which had been hers before she had ever met Maryon Rooke.

“I don’t suppose I should be really happy with anyone, Sandy.  I want too much. . . .  But it’s quite O.K. and you needn’t worry.”

With a parting nod she started off along the ribbon of road which wound its way past the gates of Trevarthen Wood, and then, dipping into the valley, climbed the hill beyond and lost itself in the broad highway of light which shimmered from the western sky.  Presently she turned aside from the road and, scrambling through a gap in a stone wall, plunged into the cool shadows of the woods.  A heavy rain had fallen during the night, soaking the thirsty earth, and the growing green things were all responsively alive and vivid once again, while the clean, pleasant smell of damp soil came fragrantly to her nostrils.

Though she tramped manfully along, Nan found her progress far from swift, for the surface of the ground was sticky and sodden after the rain.  Her boots made soft little sucking sounds at every step.  Nor was she quite sure of her road back to Mallow by way of the woods.  She had been instructed that somewhere there ran a tiny river which she must cross by means of a footbridge, and then ascend the hill on the opposite side.  “And after that,” Barry had told her, “you can’t lose yourself if you try.”

But prior to that it seemed a very probable contingency, and she was beginning to weary of plodding over the boggy land, alternately slapped by outstanding branches or—­when a little puff of wind raced overhead—­drenched by a shower of garnered raindrops from some tree which seemed to shake itself in the breeze just as a dog may shake himself after a plunge in the sea, and with apparently the same intention of wetting you as much as possible in the process.

At last from somewhere below came the sound of running water, and Nan bent her steps hopefully in its direction.  A few minutes’ further walking brought her to the head of a deep-bosomed coombe, and the mere sight of it was almost reward enough for the difficulties of the journey.  A verdant cleft, it slanted down between the hills, the trees on either side giving slow, reluctant place to big boulders, moss-bestrewn and grey, while athwart the tall brown trunks which crowned it, golden spears, sped by the westering sun, tremulously pierced the summer dusts.