The original artist who designed and painted Lowshire must have always taken a dab of blue in his brush just when he had filled it with red, to do the bridges and the old farms and barns and the cows. For in Lowshire the blues and the reds are always melting into each other like the clover.
Roger and Annette were heading towards the sea, and so you would have thought would be their companion the Rieben. But the Rieben was in no hurry. It left them continually to take the longest way, laying itself out in leisurely curves round low uplands, but always meeting them again a few miles farther on, growing more stately with every detour. Other streams swelled it, and presently wharves and townships stretched alongside of it, and ships came sailing by. It hardly seemed possible to Annette that it could be the same little river which one low arch could span at Riff.
At last they turned away from it altogether, and struck across the wide common of Gallowscore amid its stretches of yellowing bracken; and Roger showed her where, in past times, a gibbet used to hang, and told her that old Cowell the shepherd, the only man who still came to church in smock-frock and blue stockings, had walked all the way from Riff to Gallowscore, as a lad, to see three highwaymen hanging in chains on it. The great oak had been blown down later, gibbet and all, and the gibbet had never been set up again.
A walking funeral was toiling across the bracken in the direction of the church on the edge of the common, and Roger drew up and waited bareheaded till it had passed. And he told Annette of the old iniquitous Lowshire "right of heriot" which came into force when a tenant died, and how his uncle Mr. Manvers, the last lord of the manor, had let it lapse, and how Dick, the present owner, had never enforced it either.
"I couldn't have worked the estate if he had," said Roger simply. "Lady Louisa told Dick he ought to stick to it, and make me enforce it, but I said I should have to go if he did. The best horse out of his stable when a man died, and the best cow out of his field. When Dick understood what heriot meant he would not do it. He was always open-handed."
Annette looked at the little church tolling its bell, and at the three firs gathered round it.
"There is a place like this in The Magnet," she said. "That is why I seem to know it, though I've never seen it before. There ought to be a Vicarage just behind the firs, with a little garden enclosed from the bracken."
"There is," said Roger, and then added, with gross ingratitude to its author, "I never thought much of The Magnet. I like the bits about the places, and he says things about dogs that are just right, and—robins. He's good on birds. But when it comes to people——!"
Annette did not answer. It was not necessary. Roger was under way.