She checked the horse, letting it walk, while she took stock of her surroundings.

It may be asserted that there are two ways of holding converse with Nature.  The one is egotistic and sentimental, an imposing of personal tastes and emotions which betrays the latent categoric belief that the existence of external things is limited to man’s apprehension of them—­a vilely conceited if not actually blasphemous doctrine!  The other is that of the seeker and the seer, who, approaching in all reverence, asks no more than leave to listen to the voice of external things—­recognizing their independent existence, knowing them to be as real as he is, as wonderful, in their own order as permanent, possibly as potent even for good and evil as himself.  And it was, happily, according to this latter reading of the position, instinctively, by the natural bent of her mind, that Damaris attempted converse with the world without.

The glory of the heather had passed, the bloom now showing only as silver-pink froth upon an ocean of warm brown.  But the colouring was restful, the air here on the dry gravel soil light and eager, and the sense of height and space exhilarating.  A fringe of harebells, of orange hawkweed and dwarf red sorrel bordered the road.  Every small oasis of turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil.  Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning note.  A big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to a farm in the valley.  The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity.  This the young girl welcomed.  It washed her imagination free of the curious questionings, involuntary doubts and suspicions, which the house and garden at The Hard, steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, past passions, were prone to breed in her.  No reek off the mud-flats, any more than over luscious garden scents, tainted the atmosphere.  It was virgin as the soil of the moorland—­a soil as yet untamed and unfertilized by the labour of man.  And this effect of virginity, even though a trifle farouche, harsh, and barren in the perfection of its purity, appealed to Damaris’ present mood.  Her spirit leapt to meet it in proud fellowship.  For it routed forebodings.  Discounted introspective broodings.  Discounted even the apparently inevitable—­since nobody and nothing, so the young girl told herself with a rush of gladly resolute conviction, is really inevitable unless you permit or choose to have them so.—­Gallant this, and the mother of brave doings; though—­as Damaris was to discover later, to the increase both of wisdom and of sorrow—­a half-truth only.  For man is never actually master of people or of things; but master, at most, of his own attitude towards them.  In this alone can he claim or exercise free-will.