Soon they left the cinder path behind, and plunged into a green lane descending to a water-mill, turned by the tawny Stour, as yet unsullied by the refuse of factories. At a sandstone bridge, whose parapet was deeply carved with the initials of lovers long since dead or disillusioned, they paused, and, for the first time, began to talk.
“It’s a funny thing, father,” Edwin said, “but I don’t even know where we are going to-morrow. . . .”
Mr. Ingleby smiled. “Don’t you, Edwin? Well, the doctor said it would be best for me to go to my native air; and it struck me as rather a good plan. I never went there with your mother. It belonged to another life. It is quite twenty years since I have been in Somerset.”
“Somerset . . .? I didn’t even know it was Somerset.”
“No. . . . Well, as I say, it was another world.”
Somerset. . . . Edwin’s imagination began to play with the word. He could remember very little: only a huge green county sprawling on a map with rivers . . . yes, and hills. A county stretched beside the Severn Sea. The Severn again! A western county. Cheddar cheese. Lorna Doone. Cider. Coleridge. Sedgemoor.
“But what part of Somerset?”
“The eastern end.”
That was a pity. The farther west the better.
“I suppose it’s rather a flat county?”