Gone to Earth

by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

This eBook was produced by Suzanne L. Shell, Charles Franks

and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

GONE TO EARTH

by Mary Webb

1917

[Dedication] To him whose presence is home.

Chapter 1

Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky—shepherdless, futile, imponderable—and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

It was cold in the Callow—a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles.

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph—only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.