They had ceased to talk now and there was no awkwardness in the silence. Paul was leaning forward gazing about him with a queer look of eagerness upon his face.
“To come home to country like this!” he said in a low voice. “You can’t think what it means after months of brown earth and hot skies.”
Upon their right a low wall bordered the road, and on the other side of the wall fallow-deer grazed in a Park. Beyond, a line of tall oaks freshly green was the home of innumerable rooks who strewed the air about the topmost branches, wheeling and cawing. The square tower of a church stood upon a little hill.
“It’s friendly, isn’t it?” he cried, and a look of commiseration made the eyes of the girl at his side tender. Would he think this countryside so friendly when the evening was over and he had got to his room?
“Do you know our Downs?”
Phyllis spoke at random and hastily as he turned towards her.
“I wonder,” he answered. “Could I have forgotten them if I had once known them? I seem to have been within a finger’s breadth of recognising something.”
“When you have seen my mother we will walk through the village. We shall have time before dinner,” said Phyllis, and she turned the car into the carriage-way of a square old house with big windows level with the wall, which stood close to the road.
Mrs. Vanderfelt, a middle-aged woman with shrewd and kindly eyes received him with a touch of nervousness in her manner and, as her daughter had done, talked volubly and a little at random whilst she was giving him some tea.
“I don’t know what you would like to do until dinner time,” she said, and Phyllis said: