There was no point of color in the landscape save the brown foliage of the shivering beech trees, a few coarse splashes of yellow weeds, and here and there a trail of dying crimson leaves threading the barren hedgerows.  Everything was “sombre, lifeless, mournful”, and even Edgar Harrowby, though by no means sentimentally impressionable to outward conditions, felt, as he rode through the deserted lanes and looked abroad over the stagnant country, that life on the off-hunt days was but a slow-kind of thing at North Aston, and that any incident which should break the dead monotony of the scene would be welcome.

He had been thinking a great deal of Adelaide for the last four or five days, since she had dined at the Hill, and making up his mind to take the final plunge before long.  He was not in love with her, but she suited, as has been said; and that was as good as love to Edgar, who had now to take up his squiredom and country gentleman’s respectability, after having had his share of a young man’s “fling” in rather larger proportion than falls to the lot of most.  All the same, he wished that her face had more expression and that her eyes were perfectly straight; and he wanted to see Leam Dundas.

He had made a long round to-day, and was turning now homeward, when, as he had almost crossed the moor, athwart which his road led, he saw standing on a little hillock, away from the main track, the slight figure of a woman sharply defined against the sky.  She was alone, doing nothing, not seeming to be looking at anything—­just standing there on the hillock, facing the north-west, as if for pleasure in the rough freshness of the breeze.

The wind blew back her dress, and showed her girlish form, supple, flexible, graceful, fashioned like some nymph of olden time.  From her small feet, arched and narrow, gripping the ground like feet of steel, to the slender throat on which her head was set with so much grace of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of strength—­not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight, but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity—­seemed to mark her out as something different from the herd.

Edgar scarcely gave this vague impression words in his own mind, but he was conscious of a new revelation of womanhood, and he scented an adventure in this solitary figure facing the north-west wind on the lonely moor.

Her very dress, too, had a character of its own in harmony with the rest—­black all through, save for the scarlet feather in her hat, which burnt like a flame against the gray background of the sky; and her whole attitude had something of defiance in its profound stillness, while standing so boldly against the strong blasts that swept across the heights, which caught his imagination, at that moment ready to be inflamed.  All things depend on times and moods, and Edgar’s mood at this moment of first seeing Leam Dundas was favorable for the reception of new impressions.