“No, it’s not that,” he replied rather grumpily.
There was silence, for a moment. The ground here was high, and gave a view of vast prospects of dull grey weather, land, locked in the sleep of winter; woods, fields, waste lands, vague hills all neutral-tinted under the grey, drifting sky.
You could see the smoke rising from tiny cabins, you could hear, now and again, the crowing of cocks very far away, you could hear occasionally the melancholy toot of a horn from the invisible Shan, hunting his hares somewhere in the invisible distance, a figure remote from actuality as a huntsman in a dream.
A weak wind blew warm from the south, stirring the withered leaves in the hedge, and a little bird was singing somewhere near by.
“If it were all like this,” said the girl, with a sigh, “it wouldn’t be bad.”
“What?”
“Running away.”
“It will be better than this,” said he, putting his arm round her waist.
“I wish I knew his name,” said Mr Fanshawe, after the lapse of five minutes or so, “and I’d—pension him.”