“Are you going back to your stables?” she asked.
“I want two more days of this.”
“Would you like to take it down to the country? There’s a west wind blowing over my hills, and winter is coming in.”
Like children, René and Cathleen gazed at each other in surprised delight.
[III
THE WEST WIND]
Days, that in spite
Of darkness, by the light
Of a clear mind are day all night
NORTHWEST of London there are hills, where the air is eager and the upper winds are caught in woods as they come cloud-bearing from the wild sky. Often the winds fling clouds about the hills and leave them entangled in the woods. Such a cloud they had left on the Saturday morning when Lotta Cleethorpe brought René and Cathleen to her retreat, an old white cottage on the border of a long common brown with dead heather, orange with wet withered bracken, olive-green with the gorse and the close-cropped grass under the gray mist. Out of this, as they drove from the station, loomed trees and haystacks and houses. A public-house and a church stood at the end of the common. Soon they passed a blacksmith’s shop with the bellows in full blast, the sparks flying and the smith’s huge arms and swart face lit up by the red glow. There came out the merry clink of hammers on the anvil, and then the hiss of the red-hot metal plunged into water.