“My dear, how should I know why?”

She was calmly exposed to his embrace if he had only dared; but he did not dare, and went back to the loose-box wall.  Biting his finger, he stared at her gloomily.  She was stroking the muzzle of her horse; and a sort of dry rage began whisking and rustling in his heart.  She had refused him—­Harbinger!  He had not known, had not suspected how much he wanted her.  How could there be anybody else for him, while that young, calm, sweet-scented, smiling thing lived, to make his head go round, his senses ache, and to fill his heart with longing!  He seemed to himself at that moment the most unhappy of all men.

“I shall not give you up,” he muttered.

Barbara’s answer was a smile, faintly curious, compassionate, yet almost grateful, as if she had said: 

“Thank you—­who knows?”

And rather quickly, a yard or so apart, and talking of horses, they returned to the house.

It was about noon, when, accompanied by Courtier, she rode forth.

The Sou-Westerly spell—­a matter of three days—­had given way before radiant stillness; and merely to be alive was to feel emotion.  At a little stream running beside the moor under the wild stone man, the riders stopped their horses, just to listen, and, inhale the day.  The far sweet chorus of life was tuned to a most delicate rhythm; not one of those small mingled pipings of streams and the lazy air, of beasts, men; birds, and bees, jarred out too harshly through the garment of sound enwrapping the earth.  It was noon—­the still moment—­but this hymn to the sun, after his too long absence, never for a moment ceased to be murmured.  And the earth wore an under-robe of scent, delicious, very finely woven of the young fern sap, heather buds; larch-trees not yet odourless, gorse just going brown, drifted woodsmoke, and the breath of hawthorn.  Above Earth’s twin vestments of sound and scent, the blue enwrapping scarf of air, that wistful wide champaign, was spanned only by the wings of Freedom.

After that long drink of the day, the riders mounted almost in silence to the very top of the moor.  There again they sat quite still on their horses, examining the prospect.  Far away to South and East lay the sea, plainly visible.  Two small groups of wild ponies were slowly grazing towards each other on the hillside below.

Courtier said in a low voice: 

“’Thus will I sit and sing, with love in my arms; watching our two herds mingle together, and below us the far, divine, cerulean sea.’”

And, after another silence, looking steadily in Barbara’s face, he added: 

“Lady Barbara, I am afraid this is the last time we shall be alone together.  While I have the chance, therefore, I must do homage....  You will always be the fixed star for my worship.  But your rays are too bright; I shall worship from afar.  From your seventh Heaven, therefore, look down on me with kindly eyes, and do not quite forget me:”