WINCANTON              8 M.
Castle Wharton         3 1/2 M.
Chilmark               3 M.

So ran the clear lettering on the southern arm.  Eastwards a much more weatherbeaten arm, pointing crookedly up a stony cart track, said in dim brown characters:  “Chilmark 2 M.”  Plainly a short cut over the moor!  Better stones underfoot than padded dust:  and Lawrence struck uphill swiftly, glad to escape from the traffic of the London road.  But he knew too much about short cuts to be surprised when, after climbing five hundred feet in twice as many yards—­for the gradients off the Plain are steep—­he found himself adrift on the open moor, his track going five ways at once in the light dry grass.

He halted, leaning on his stick.  He was on the edge of the Plain:  below him stretched away a great half-ring of cultivated country, its saliencies the square tower of a church jutting over a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange—­the tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years.  On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an alien.  It touched him, but to revolt.  More than a child of the soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also as an oppression, a limitation:  an ordered littleness from which world-interests were excluded.  He was a lover of art and a cosmopolitan, and though the lowland landscape was itself a piece of art, and perfect in its way, Hyde’s mind found no home in it.  Yet, he reflected with his tolerant smile, he had fought for it, and was ready any day to fight for it again—­for stability and tradition, the Game Laws, the Established Church, and the rotation of crops.  He was the son of an English mother and had received the training of an Englishman.  A rather cynical smile, now and then, at the random and diffident ways of England was the only freedom he allowed to the foreign strain within him.

And when he looked the other way even this faint feeling of irritation passed off, blown away by the wind that always blows across a moor, thin and sweet now, and sunlit as the light curled clouds that it carried overhead through the profound June blue.  Acres upon acres of pale sward, sown all over with the blue of scabious and the lemon-yellow of hawkweed, stretched away in rolling undulations like the plain of the sea; dense woods hung massed on the far horizon, beech-woods, sapphire blue beyond the pale silver and amber, of the middle distance, and under them a puff of white smoke from a passing train, or was it the white scar of a quarry?  He could not be sure across so many miles of sunlit air, but it must have been smoke, for it dissolved slowly away till there was no gleam left under the brown hillside.  Here too was stability, permanence:  the wind ruffling the grass as it had done when the Normans crossed their not far distant Channel, or rattling over hilltops through leather-coated oak groves which had kept their symmetry since their progenitors were planted by the Druids.  Here was nothing to cramp the mind:  here was the England that has absorbed Celt, Saxon, Fleming, Norman, generation after generation, each with its passing form of political faith:  the England of traditional eld, the beloved country.