But when they had been shown their sitting-room, and had ordered their supper—­lamb and early peas and gooseberry tart with tons of cream—­Mrs. Gustus saw the Ring, that great green breast of the country, against the broken evening sky, and said, “Now I see heights, and I shall never be happy or hungry till I have climbed them.  The Lord made me so that I am never content until I am as near the sky as possible.  Silly, no doubt.  But what a sky!  Blood-red and pale pink, what a unique chord of colour.”

“Same chord as the livery of the Bank or England,” said Kew, who was hungry, and had an aching shoulder.  He hated beauty talked, just as he hated poetry forced into print apropos of nothing.  Even to hear the Psalms read aloud used to make him blush, before his honest orthodoxy hardened him.

Mrs. Gustus asked the lamb and gooseberry tart to delay their coming; she placed Cousin Gustus in an arm-chair, first wrapping him up because he felt cold, and then unwrapping him again because he felt hot; she kissed him good-bye.

“We shan’t be more than an hour,” she said.  When Mrs. Gustus said an hour, she meant two.  If she had meant an hour, she would have said twenty minutes.  “You must watch for us to appear on the highest point of the Ring.”

“Don’t watch, but pray,” murmured Kew.  “There’s that thunderstorm just working up to another display.”

And so it was, but when they reached the ridge of down that led to the Ring, they were glad they had come.  They were half-drowned, and half-blinded, and half-deafened, but there is a reward to every effort.  There was an enormous sky, and the sunlight spilled between the clouds to fall in pools upon the world.  There was a chord made by many larks in the sky; the valleys held joy as a cup holds water.  From the down the chalk-pits took great bites; the crinolined trees curtseyed down the slopes.  The happy-coloured sea cut the world in half; the sight of a distant town at the corner of the river and the coast made one laugh for pleasure.  There was a boat with sunlit sails creeping across the sea.  I never see a boat on an utterly lonely sea without thinking of the secret stories that it carries, of the sun moving round that private world, of the shadows upon the deck that I cannot see, of the song of passing seas that I cannot hear, of the night coming across a great horizon to devour it when I shall have forgotten it.  Further off and more suggestive than a star, it seems to me.

A gust of sunlight struck the watchers, and passed:  they each ran a few steps towards the sight that pleased them most.  And then they stood so long that Mr. Russell’s Hound had time to make himself acquainted with every smell within twenty yards.  He turned over a snail that sat—­round and striped like a peppermint bull’s-eye—­on the short grass, he patted a little beetle that pushed its way across a world of disproportionate size, and then, by peevishly pulling the end of his whip which hung from Mr. Russell’s pensive hand, he suggested that the pursuit should continue.  So they walked to the crest of wood that stands at the top of the Ring, a compressed tabloid forest, fifty yards from side to side, as round as a florin piece.