"Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still."
—FLETCHER.
Nothing compelled Melicent to listen, so she sat on Tod's Trush, just over his pathetic little doorway, her arms round her knees, her eyes fixed, full of the forward-reaching, time-devouring dreams of youth, upon the lovely lines of the land, ridge beyond ridge, dying into grape-bloom haze upon the faint horizon.
She was not unhappy. Her isolation hardly distressed her; she was accustomed to being an alien among unsympathetic people. She was, however, considering what she should do. She actively disliked her aunt, was repelled by her uncle, mentally herded her cousins and their governess together as so many silly triflers, not particularly honest. But all this she could bear, if only she might learn to fit herself for her future; and this, it appeared, was impossible.
If only it had not been so! For here she felt that she could live and work. Soul and body were being laved in pure air—renewed and vivified. The terrible sense of antagonism to all her surroundings which she had always felt in Africa was gone. There she had been craving, craving all the time for she knew not what; her cry had been that of Paracelsus—"I go to find my soul!" It seemed to her that she had found it, or would find it, in the stern keeping of this rugged land, where the only thing that was out of harmony was the attitude of her own kindred.
Just opposite to her, among the broken ground which rose from the main valley, forming a ridge parallel to that on which she sat, was a little house, embowered in fruit trees.
An ampylopsis creeper on the grey stone wall gave a touch of vivid scarlet; a great purple Jackmanii clematis smothered the porch.
"There," thought Melicent, "I could wish to be. There I could live and learn things, and the days would never seem too long."
She studied the little remote place, trying to see whether any road led to it, and admiring the way in which it stood, as if lifting its face to the kisses of the southern and western sun.
Lost in reverie, she had not heard the approach of anyone, and was surprised when a dog jumped through the heather near her, on the side of the Trush farthest from where her cousins were seated. A whirring of strong brown wings arose from their covert, and a grouse family shot up, with indignant "Cock-cocks," wheeling in the blue air. Three guns cracked, and in a moment the five Vicarage girls were on their feet.
As three sportsmen appeared, Gwen made one bound to where Millie sat, her face aflame.