On the Squire’s face in the full sun was more than the sun’s flush.

“Thanks,” he said, “she’s very well.  She’s gone up to London.”

“And aren’t you going up yourself this season?”

The Squire crossed those leisurely eyes with his own.

“I don’t think so,” he said slowly.

The Hon. Geoffrey returned to his duties.

“We got poor old Barter for a ’blob’!” he said over his shoulder.

The Squire became aware that Mr. Barter was approaching from behind.

“You see that left-hand fellow?” he said, pouting.  “Just watch his foot. 
D’you mean to say that wasn’t a no-ball?  He bowled me with a no-ball. 
He’s a rank no-batter.  That fellow Locke’s no more an umpire than——­”

He stopped and looked earnestly at the bowler.

The Squire ’did not answer, sitting on his mare as though carved in stone.  Suddenly his throat clicked.

“How’s your wife?” he said.  “Margery would have come to see her, but—­but she’s gone up to London.”

The Rector did not turn his head.

“My wife?  Oh, going on first-rate.  There’s another!  I say, Winlow, this is too bad!”

The Hon. Geoffrey’s pleasant voice was heard: 

“Please not to speak to the man at the wheel!”

The Squire turned the mare and rode away; and the spaniel John, who had been watching from a measured distance, followed after, his tongue lolling from his mouth.

The Squire turned through a gate down the main aisle of the home covert, and the nose and the tail of the spaniel John, who scented creatures to the left and right, were in perpetual motion.  It was cool in there.  The June foliage made one long colonnade, broken by a winding river of sky.  Among the oaks and hazels; the beeches and the elms, the ghostly body of a birch-tree shone here and there, captured by those grosser trees which seemed to cluster round her, proud of their prisoner, loth to let her go, that subtle spirit of their wood.  They knew that, were she gone, their forest lady, wilder and yet gentler than themselves—­they would lose credit, lose the grace and essence of their corporate being.

The Squire dismounted, tethered his horse, and sat under one of those birch-trees, on the fallen body of an elm.  The spaniel John also sat and loved him with his eyes.  And sitting there they thought their thoughts, but their thoughts were different.

For under this birch-tree Horace Pendyce had stood and kissed his wife the very day he brought her home to Worsted Skeynes, and though he did not see the parallel between her and the birch-tree that some poor imaginative creature might have drawn, yet was he thinking of that long past afternoon.  But the spaniel John was not thinking of it; his recollection was too dim, for he had been at that time twenty-eight years short of being born.