So far then Mrs. Thresk’s stinging speeches seemed to have been justified.  But at the age of twenty-eight he took a holiday.  He went down for a month into Sussex, and there the ordered scheme of his life was threatened.  It stood the attack; and again it is possible to plead in its favour with a good show of argument.  But the attack, nevertheless, brings into light another point of view.

Prudence, for instance, the disputant might urge, is all very well in the ordinary run of life, but when the great moments come conduct wants another inspiration.  Such an one would consider that holiday with a thought to spare for Stella Derrick, who during its passage saw much of Henry Thresk.  The actual hour when the test came happened on one of the last days of August.

CHAPTER II

ON BIGNOR HILL

They were riding along the top of the South Downs between Singleton and Arundel, and when they came to where the old Roman road from Chichester climbs over Bignor Hill, Stella Derrick raised her hand and halted.  She was then nineteen and accounted lovely by others besides Henry Thresk, who on this morning rode at her side.  She was delicately yet healthfully fashioned, with blue eyes under broad brows, raven hair and a face pale and crystal-clear.  But her lips were red and the colour came easily into her cheeks.

She pointed downwards to the track slanting across the turf from the brow of the hill.

“That’s Stane Street.  I promised to show it you.”

“Yes,” answered Thresk, taking his eyes slowly from her face.  It was a morning rich with sunlight, noisy with blackbirds, and she seemed to him a necessary part of it.  She was alive with it and gave rather than took of its gold.  For not even that finely chiselled nose of hers could impart to her anything of the look of a statue.

“Yes.  They went straight, didn’t they, those old centurions?” he said.

He moved his horse and stood in the middle of the track looking across a valley of forest and meadow to Halnaker Down, six miles away in the southwest.  Straight in the line of his eyes over a shoulder of the down rose a tall fine spire—­the spire of Chichester Cathedral, and farther on he could see the water in Bosham Creek like a silver mirror, and the Channel rippling silver beyond.  He turned round.  Beneath him lay the blue dark weald of Sussex, and through it he imagined the hidden line of the road driving straight as a ruler to London.

“No going about!” he said.  “If a hill was in the way the road climbed over it; if a marsh it was built through it.”

They rode on slowly along the great whaleback of grass, winding in and out amongst brambles and patches of yellow-flaming gorse.  The day was still even at this height; and when, far away, a field of long grass under a stray wind bent from edge to edge with the swift motion of running water, it took them both by surprise.  And they met no one.  They seemed to ride in the morning of a new clean world.  They rose higher on to Duncton Down, and then the girl spoke.