She was bound for the little wood that lay in a fold of the moorland above the sea.  This wood was to her what a City of Refuge was to the Hebrews of the Old Testament, and, like them, she fled to it when the world’s opinion of what was fit had proved at variance with her own.  To-night she went to it not for sanctuary from others, but to commune with herself—­in truth, for the first time she went not because of what she had left but because of what she would find.  Her bare heels were winged along the road.

The wood lay lapped in the shadow that the western ridge had cast on it an hour earlier than the rest of the world’s bedtime, ever since the trees had been there to receive the chill caress, and that was for many a hundred years.  Old Madgy swore that even in her young day the small folk had still held their revels on the mossy slopes amongst the fanlike roots, and who knows what larger folk had not fled there to wanton more sweetly than in close cottages, or, like Loveday, to play the more easily with their thoughts?  The wood alone knew, and it held its memories as closely as it held the thousand tiny lives confided to its care; the bright-eyed shrew-mice that poked quivering noses through the litter of last year’s leaves, the birds that nested behind the clustering twigs, the slow-worms that slipped along its grassy ditches.

Loveday turned off from the road and approached the wood from the west, pausing when she reached the smooth grey boulders that were piled along the ridge.  She stood there gazing out over the smiling champaign, pale and verdant from the farthest rim to the treetops that made as it were a sea of faint green at her feet, for already in that soft clime the twigs were misty with young leaf, and on the willows the velvety pearl-hued ovals had begun to deck themselves with a delicate powdering of gold, while from the hazels beside her the yellow lambs’ tails hung still as tiny pennants in the evening air.  The gold of nature was as yet more vivid than her green, which still showed tentative, enquiring of April what of betrayal might not lie in the careless plaits of her garment.  To Loveday, high on her rock, between the gold of the sky and the gold of the blossom, it seemed that April must of a certainty stay as fair as this and lead to as bright a May, when that vision of her new self should become a yet brighter reality.  She was confident of April because she was confident of life, lapped in an aureate glow that seemed to suffuse the very air she drew into her lungs so that it intoxicated her like the breath of a diviner ether from Olympian heights.  She had seen beauty, and lo! it had been revealed to her not as a thing apart and unattainable, but as a quality within herself.  Her “difference” had become a blazon, not a branding.