For all that touched his past among his fellows, or their remembrance of him, he might have been in another planet; and Sophie, whose life had been very largely spent among husbandless wives of lofty ideals, had no wish to leave this present of God. The unhurried meals, the foreknowledge of deliciously empty hours to follow, the breadths of soft sky under which they walked together and reckoned time only by their hunger or thirst; the good grass beneath their feet that cheated the miles; their discoveries, always together, amid the farms—Griffons, Rocketts, Burnt House, Gale Anstey, and the Home Farm, where Iggulden of the blue smock-frock would waylay them, and they would ransack the old house once more; the long wet afternoons when they tucked up their feet on the bedroom's deep window-sill over against the apple-trees, and talked together as never till then had they found time to talk—these things contented her soul, and her body throve.
“Have you realized,” she asked one morning, “that we've been here absolutely alone for the last thirty-four days?”
“Have you counted them?” he asked.
“Did you like them?” she replied.
“I must have. I didn't think about them. Yes, I have. Six months ago I should have fretted myself sick. Remember at Cairo? I've only had two or three bad times. Am I getting better, or is it senile decay?”
“Climate, all climate.” Sophie swung her new-bought English boots, as she sat on the stile overlooking Friars Pardon, behind the Clokes's barn.
“One must take hold of things though,” he said, “if it's only to keep one's hand in.” His eyes did not flicker now as they swept the empty fields. “Mustn't one?”
“Lay out a Morristown links over Gale Anstey. I dare say you could hire it.”
“No, I'm not as English as that—nor as Morristown. Cloke says all the farms here could be made to pay.”
“Well, I'm Anastasia in the 'Treasure of Franchard.' I'm content to be alive and purr. There's no hurry.”