They had left the outskirts of the town behind, and were bowling along a tree-hung road, which in summer would have been a green tunnel. The brown woods stood out above the whitened landscape, sombre in their winter nakedness, but always beautiful, over beyond an open, snow powdered stubble. Then between coverts of dark firs, where pheasants crowed, flapping their way up to their nightly roost. Past a hamlet embedded in tall, naked trees, then more dark firwoods interstudded with birch where the heathery openings broke the uniform evergreen—then out again for a space—on a bit of heathery upland which would be glowing crimson in golden August.
“You can see around here for a bit,” said Mervyn, pointing with his whip. “Away there on the ridge, that tower is Lower Gidding, so called, presumably because Upper Gidding, ten miles away, is about two hundred feet lower down to the sea level. Beyond that last wooded ridge but one, is my shop—our shop I mean.”
“It’s lovely,” replied the girl looking round with animation, and taking in the whole landscape.
“Yes, perfectly lovely. And look. Here’s the sunset I told you we were going to get.”
On the north eastern sky line, an opaque bank of clouds had heaved up—a bank of clouds that seemed to bode another snowfall. The sun, sinking in a fiery bed, away in the cloudless west, was touching this—and lo, in a trice, the mountainous masses of the rising cloud-tier were first tinged, than bathed in a flood of glowing copper red. Between, the long tongues of dark woodland stood out from the whitened ground. The bark of a dog, from this or that distant farmhouse, came up clear on the silent distance, and then from this or that covert, arose the melodious hoot of owls, answering each other.
“What a picture!” cried the girl, turning an animated face upon her new guardian. “Heavens, what a picture! And to think that this time yesterday I was staring at a row of hideous black chimney pots under a hideous murky sky. Not only yesterday, but day after day before! And—Uncle Seward, you live in the midst of this!”
Mervyn smiled to himself, then at her, and his smile was a very good one to behold.
“Yes, dear, I do,” he answered gently. “And now you are going to as well.”
Down a steep road between dark woods, then an opening. A long reach of ice cleft their depth; then a sudden quacking as several wild duck sprang upwards from an open hole by the sluice, and swished high above their heads.
“Wild duck, aren’t they?” cried the girl, turning her head to watch them, then looking up the frozen expanse. “Why it might be some lake in the middle of the backwoods of Canada, such as one reads about.”