Before breakfast next morning Fitzjocelyn must visit his farm, and Mary must come with him.
How delicious was that English morning after their voyage; the slant rays of the sun silvering the turf, and casting rainbows across the gossamer threads from one brown bent to another; the harvest fields on the slopes dotted with rich sheaves of wheat; the coppices, in their summer glory, here and there touched with the gold of early autumn, and the slopes and meadows bright with lively green, a pleasant change for eyes fresh from the bare, rugged mountain-side and the rank unwholesome vegetation of Panama. Shaggy little Scottish oxen were feeding on the dewy grass, their black coats looking sleek in the sun beyond the long shadows of the thorns; but as Mary said, laughing, 'Only Farmer Fitzjocelyn's cattle came here now,' and she stopped more than once to be introduced to some notable animal, or to hear the history of experiments in fatting beasts.
'There! they have found you out! That's for you,' said Louis, as a merry peal of bells broke out from the church tower, and came joyously up through the tranquil air. 'Yes, Ormersfield, you are greeting a friend! You may be very glad, old place! I wish Mr. Holdsworth would come up to breakfast! Is it too wet for you this way, Mary?'
This way was into Fernydell, and Mary answered, 'Oh, no—no; it is where I most wanted to go with you. We have never been there together since—'
'No, you never would walk with me after I could go alone!' said Louis, with a playful tone of reproach, veiling deep feeling.
In silence he handed her down the rocky steps, plunging deeper among the hazels and rowan-trees; then pausing, he turned aside the luxuriant leaves of a tuft of hartstongue, and showed her, cut on a stone, veiled both by the verdure and the form of the rock, the letters—
Deo Gratias,
L. F. 1847.
'I like that!' was all that Mary's full heart allowed her to say.
'Yes,' said Louis, 'I feel quite as thankful for the accident as for the preservation.'
'And that dear mamma was with us,' added Mary. 'Between her and you, it was a blessing to us all. I see these letters are not new; you must have cut them out long ago.'