Boy looked down into it and longed, as often before, that she had wings on which to float upon that soft and undulating sea of shadow.

Not seldom this desire was so strong upon her that she felt a certainty she had wings, wings within her which she could not spread, but of the existence of which this insurgent desire was the irrefragable witness.

The sides of the coombe were hung with beeches sheathed now in tenderest green; while from out of the emptiness beneath, the insistent and melancholy cry of lambs seemed to make the shadows quiver and touched a chord of wistfulness in the heart of the girl.

The sun was already sinking behind the smooth ramparts of the hills and rose to meet them as they climbed, peering at them over the summit through the shaggy eyebrow of the gorse.

Boy walked beside the old mare, throwing every now and then swift and surreptitious glances at her new treasure.  She was fearful lest the young man leading his pony on the foot-track at her side should think her a baby and over-keen.

Once only he spoke to her, and that clearly with the difficulty of the shy.

“What shall you cuc-call her?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

She longed to help him, but when the chance came she could only snub him.  That was always the way with Boy, when she was in touch with somebody she liked.

Old Mat came unconsciously to the rescue.

“Why, Four Pound, o’ course,” he panted, labouring up the hill, his hands on his knees.

“Is she Black Death blood?” asked the young man.

“Yes, she’s Black Death all right,” answered the old man.  “That’s the old Pocahontas strain.  Jumpers to a gee.  You know.  Look at them gray hairs at the root of her tail—­and that lazy, too! sluttin’ along with her nose out and her tongue a-waggin’.  They’re all like that, Black Deaths are.  If you was to let off a bomb under her belly, she wouldn’t so much as switch her tail.  Couldn’t be bothered.  Constitutions like hoxes, too.”  He paused to pant.  “If what that feller said was O.K., why then she’s worth money, too.  Only o’ course it ain’t.  Else he wouldn’t ha’ said it.”

On the top of the Downs, facing the wind that blew straight from the sun sinking over Newhaven into the sea, they paused to breathe.  Beneath them stretched the Weald, and the great saucer of Pevensey Bay ringed about with a line of brown sand fringed with foam.  Northward was Crowborough Beacon, the Ashdown Forest Ridge, and the hills about Battle Abbey.  Southward, and the way of the setting sun, the Downs ran out in huge spurs, line behind line of them, into the shining splendour of the sea, to break off abruptly in the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters.  The hills were bare and bleak in their austere yet rounded strength, stripped of trees, clothed only in resplendent gorse, here a squat haystack dumped upon a ridge against the sky, there a great patch of plough let into the green.