He found that Nan was already some way ahead, or rather overhead; but he soon overtook her. She was startled when she saw him, for the snow had deadened the sound of his approach.

'I believe it will clear soon,' he said at a venture.

'It is altogether very strange,' Nan said in something of a lower voice. 'The fir-trees laden with snow like that, the cold, the gloom: it looks like some bygone Christmas come back suddenly. It is strange to find yourself in another part of the year: yesterday, summer; to-day, winter. I should not be surprised to meet a cart filled with holly, or to hear the bells ringing for morning service.'

'You know there are people who never see winter,' said he; 'I wonder what it feels like when you move from place to place so as to live in a perpetual spring and summer.'

'I don't think it can be the real spring,' she said, after a second. 'The summer, I suppose, is the same anywhere; it hasn't the newness and the strangeness of the spring. Wouldn't it be a nice thing now to be able to take some poor English lady who has been compelled to live all the early months of each year in the south, among hot-house sort of things, and just to show her for a minute a little English village in the real spring time, such as she must have known when she was a girl, with the daffodils in the cottage gardens, and the young leaves on the elm and the hawthorn. And perhaps a lark would be singing high up; and there might be a scent of wallflower; and the children coming home with daisy wreaths. She would cry, perhaps; but she would like it better than the hot-house flowers and the Riviera. There are some things that have a wonderful way of bringing back old memories—the first smell of wallflower in the spring is one, and the first fall of snow in the winter. And there's an old-fashioned kind of musky smell, too, that always means Sunday clothes, and a tall pew, and a village choir.'

'But you seem to have a strong faculty of association,' said young
Frank King, who was far more interested in Nan than in musk.

'I don't know,' she said carelessly. 'I don't study myself much. But I know I have a strong bump of locality—isn't that what they call it? I wish I had been born in a splendid place. I wish I had been born among great mountains, or amongst remote sea islands, or even beautiful lake scenery; and I know I should have loved my native place passionately and yearned for it; and I should have thought it was the most beautiful place in the world—especially when I was away from it—for that's the usual way. But when you are born in London and live in Brighton, you can't make much out of that.'

Then she added with some compunction,

'Not but that I am very fond of the south coast. I know it so well; and of course you get fond of anything that you are very intimate with, especially if other people don't know much about it. And there is far more solitariness about the south coast than the people imagine who come down to the Bedford Hotel for a week.'

'You are a great walker, are you not?' he said.