Once clear of the streets, I gave the car her head.

For a while we slid past low-lying ground, verdant and fresh and blowing, but flat and sparsely timbered, with coppices here and there and, sometimes, elms in the hedgerows, and, now and again, a parcel of youngster oaks about a green—­fair country enough at any time, and at this summer sundown homely and radiant.  But there was better to come.

The car fled on.

Soon the ground rose sharply by leaps and bounds, the yellow road swerving to right and left, deep tilted meadows on one side with a screen of birches beyond, and on the other a sloping rabble of timber, whose foliage made up a tattered motley, humble and odd and bastard, yet, with it all, so rich in tender tones and unexpected feats of drapery that Adele cried that it was a slice of fairyland and sat with her chin on her shoulder, till the road curled up into the depths of a broad pine-wood, through which it cut, thin, and dead straight, and cool, and strangely solemn.  In a flash it had become the nave of a cathedral, immense, solitary.  Sombre and straight and tall, the walls rose up to where the swaying roof sobered the mellow sunshine and only let it pass dim and so, sacred.  The wanton breeze, caught in the maze of tufted pinnacles, filtered its chastened way, a pensive organist, learned to draw grave litanies from the boughs and reverently voice the air of sanctity.  The fresh familiar scent hung for a smokeless incense, breathing high ritual and redolent of pious mystery.  No circumstance of worship was unobserved.  With one consent birds, beasts and insects made not a sound.  The precious pall of silence lay like a phantom cloud, unruffled.  Nature was on her knees.

The car fled on.

Out of the priestless sanctuary, up over the crest of the rise, into the kiss of the sunlight we sailed, and so on to a blue-brown moor, all splashed and dappled with the brilliant yellow of the gorse in bloom and rolling away into the hazy distance like an untroubled sea.  So for a mile it flowed, a lazy pomp of purple, gold-flecked and glowing.  Then came soft cliffs of swelling woodland, rising to stay its course with gentle dignity—­walls that uplifted eyes found but the dwindled edge of a far mightier flood that stretched and tossed, a leafy waste of billows, flaunting more living shades of green than painters dream of, laced here and there with gold and, once in a long while, shot with crimson, rising and falling with Atlantic grandeur, till the eye faltered, and the proud rich waves seemed to be breaking on the rosy sky.

And over all the sun lay dying, his crimson ebb of life staining the firmament with splendour, his mighty heart turning the dance of Death to a triumphant progress, where Blood and Flame rode by with clouds for chargers, and Earth and Sky themselves shouldered the litter of their passing King.

An exclamation of wonder broke from Adele, and Jill cried to me to stop.