“Yes. Why? Do you know it?” she asked.
“I should think I do,” he said. “I’ve gone there every year, when I have been in England, for the last fifteen years.”
“With whom do you stay, then? Oh, this is happy, to hear of home now, here.”
“I do not stay,” he answered. “As a rule I go over for the day, and then away in the evening. You see, I know nobody there, now: in a way I never did. I go to the inn near the river, the Hunt and Hounds; then I go on the river, and away by the evening train, the 7.13.”
“I expect we have passed each other,” she said.
“Very likely,” he said. “Whereabouts do you live there, Miss Kingsborough? Could you describe it?”
“Yes. For the last ten years we have lived at The Murreys, which you may not know, but must have seen, if you have been to the Hunt.”
“I know the outside of your home very well, then,” he said. “It’s called The Murreys from the mulberry trees. Whenever I go on the river there, I land in one of the fields below your house and walk from the river to your garden wall. The field is called Bridger’s Peace; do you know why?”
“It means the piece of ground where the bridgers camped when they built the bridge in the fourteenth century.”
“I thought it was the other kind of peace,” he said, “the ‘Peace which passeth all understanding’; which it has always been to me.”