Suddenly, on a path which climbed the hill-side till it was lost in the beech wood which crowned the summit, she saw a flock of sheep, and behind them a shepherd boy running from side to side.  At the sight, her eyes kindled again.  “Nothing changes,” she thought, “in this country life!” On the morning of Charles I.’s execution—­in the winters and springs when Elizabeth was Queen—­while Becket lay dead on Canterbury steps—­when Harold was on his way to Senlac—­that hill, that path were there—­sheep were climbing it, and shepherds were herding them.  “It has been so since England began—­it will be so when I am dead.  We are only shadows that pass.  But England lives always—­always—­and shall live!”

And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet country scene.

The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun to inhabit stood upon an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north and east and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over and sheltered by the downs.  Pastures studded with trees sloped away from the house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary woods; only the church tower emerged.  From the deep oriel window where she sat Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its mellowed red brick, its Jacobean windows and roof.  She could see also a corner of the moat with its running stream, a moat much older than the building it encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal garden planned in the days of John Evelyn—­with its fountain and its sundial, and its beds in arabesque.  The cold light of December lay upon it all; there was no special beauty in the landscape, and no magnificence in the house or its surroundings.  But every detail of what she saw pleased the girl’s taste, and satisfied her heart.  All the while she was comparing it with other scenes and another landscape, amid which she had lived till now—­a monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of hotels, and everywhere a chattering unlovely crowd.

“Thank goodness!—­that’s done with,” she thought—­only to fall into a sudden remorse.  “Papa—­papa!—­if you were only here too!”

She pressed her hands to her eyes, which were moist with sudden tears.  But the happiness in her heart overcame the pang, sharp and real as it was.  Oh! how blessed to have done with the Riviera, and its hybrid empty life, for good and all!—­how blessed even, to have done with the Alps and Italy!—­how blessed, above all, to have come home!—­home into the heart of this English land—­warm mother-heart, into which she, stranger and orphan, might creep and be at rest.