From her first discovery of them, she had been attracted by the marshes with their English suggestion of the Roman Campagna, their broad expanse of level land spread out to the sun and wind, the thousands of white sheep dotted or clustered as far as eye could reach, the hues of the marsh grass and the plants growing thick at the borders of the strips of water.  Its beauty was all its own and curiously aloof from the softly-wooded, undulating world about it.  Driving or walking along the high road—­the road the Romans had built to London town long centuries ago—­on either side of one were meadows, farms, scattered cottages, and hop gardens, but beyond and below stretched the marsh land, golden and grey, and always alluring one by its silence.

“I never pass it without wanting to go to it—­to take solitary walks over it, to be one of the spots on it as the sheep are.  It seems as if, lying there under the blue sky or the low grey clouds with all the world held at bay by mere space and stillness, they must feel something we know nothing of.  I want to go and find out what it is.”

This she had once said to Mount Dunstan.

So she had fallen into the habit of walking there with her dog at her side as her sole companion, for having need for time and space for thought, she had found them in the silence and aloofness.

Life had been a vivid and pleasurable thing to her, as far as she could look back upon it.  She began to realise that she must have been very happy, because she had never found herself desiring existence other than such as had come to her day by day.  Except for her passionate childish regret at Rosy’s marriage, she had experienced no painful feeling.  In fact, she had faced no hurt in her life, and certainly had been confronted by no limitations.  Arguing that girls in their teens usually fall in love, her father had occasionally wondered that she passed through no little episodes of sentiment, but the fact was that her interests had been larger and more numerous than the interests of girls generally are, and her affectionate intimacy with himself had left no such small vacant spaces as are frequently filled by unimportant young emotions.  Because she was a logical creature, and had watched life and those living it with clear and interested eyes, she had not been blind to the path which had marked itself before her during the summer’s growth and waning.  She had not, at first, perhaps, known exactly when things began to change for her—­when the clarity of her mind began to be disturbed.  She had thought in the beginning—­as people have a habit of doing—­that an instance—­a problem—­a situation had attracted her attention because it was absorbing enough to think over.  Her view of the matter had been that as the same thing would have interested her father, it had interested herself.  But from the morning when she had been conscious of the sudden fury roused in her by Nigel Anstruthers’ ugly sneer at Mount Dunstan, she had better understood the