Julia was collecting fir-cones.  All around her the land lay brown and still; dead heather, and sometimes dead bracken, a shade paler, and, more rarely, gorse bushes, nearly brown, too, in their sober winter dress.  It was almost flat, a wonderful illimitable place, very remote, very silent, unbroken except for occasional pine-trees.  These were not scattered but grew in clumps, miles apart, though looking near in this place of distances, and also in a belt not more than five or six trees wide, winding mile after mile like a black band over the plain.  Julia stood on the edge of this belt now, gathering the dropped cones and putting them into a sack.  The afternoon was advanced and already it was beginning to grow dark among the trees, but she determined not to go till she had got all she could carry.  It was the first time she had been to collect cones; she had sent her father once and Mr. Gillat once.  They had taken longer and gathered less than she, but it was not on that account that she had gone herself to-day.  Rather it was because she wanted to go to the dark belt of trees which she saw every day from her window, and because she wanted to go right out into the wide open land and see what it looked like and feel what it felt like.  And when she got there she found it, like the Dunes, all she had expected and more.

At last she had her sack full, and, shouldering it, carried it off on her back, which, seeing the comfort of the arrangement, must be the way Nature intended weights to be carried.  Clear of the shadow of the trees it was lighter; the grey sky held the light long; twilight seemed to creep up from the ground rather than fall from above, as if darkness were an earth-born thing that gained slowly, and, for a time, only upon the brighter gift of Heaven.  It was quieter, too, out here, for under the pines, though the weather was still, there was a breathing moan as if the trees sighed incessantly in their sleep.  But out here in the brown land it was very quiet; the air light and dry and keen, with the flavour of the not distant sea mingled with the smell of the pines and the dead ferns—­a thing to stir the pulse and revive the memory of the divine inheritance and the old belief that man is but a little lower than the angels, related to the infinite and god-like.

White’s Cottage stood where the heath-land ceased and the sand began.  There was much sand; tradition said it had gradually overwhelmed a village that lay beyond; indeed, that White’s Cottage was the last and most distant house of the lost place.  Be that as it may, it certainly was very solitary, rather far from the village of Halgrave, with no road leading to it except the track that came from Halgrave and stopped at the cottage gate—­there was nowhere to go beyond.

Dusk had almost deepened to darkness when Julia reached the house; it gleamed curiously in the half light, for it was built of flints, for the most part grey, but with a paler one here and there catching the light.  She put her sack of cones in one of the several sheds which were built on the sides of the cottage, and which, being of the same flint material, made it look larger than it was.  Then she went into the kitchen.