its blackbird or thrush in full even-song.  Swallows were flying rather low, and the sky, whose moods they watch, had the slumberous, surcharged beauty of a long, fine day, with showers not far away.  Some orchards were still in blossom, and the great wild bees, hunting over flowers and grasses warm to their touch, kept the air deeply murmurous.  Movement, light, color, song, scent, the warm air, and the fluttering leaves were confused, till one had almost become the other.

And Stanley thought, for he was not rhapsodic ’Wonderful pretty country!  The way everything’s looked after—­you never see it abroad!’

But the car, a creature with little patience for natural beauty, had brought him to the crossroads and stood, panting slightly, under the cliff-bank whereon grew Tod’s cottage, so loaded now with lilac, wistaria, and roses that from the road nothing but a peak or two of the thatched roof could be seen.

Stanley was distinctly nervous.  It was not a weakness his face and figure were very capable of showing, but he felt that dryness of mouth and quivering of chest which precede adventures of the soul.  Advancing up the steps and pebbled path, which Clara had trodden once, just nineteen years ago, and he himself but three times as yet in all, he cleared his throat and said to himself:  ’Easy, old man!  What is it, after all?  She won’t bite!’ And in the very doorway he came upon her.

What there was about this woman to produce in a man of common sense such peculiar sensations, he no more knew after seeing her than before.  Felix, on returning from his visit, had said, “She’s like a Song of the Hebrides sung in the middle of a programme of English ballads.”  The remark, as any literary man’s might, had conveyed nothing to Stanley, and that in a far-fetched way.  Still, when she said:  “Will you come in?” he felt heavier and thicker than he had ever remembered feeling; as a glass of stout might feel coming across a glass of claret.  It was, perhaps, the gaze of her eyes, whose color he could not determine, under eyebrows that waved in the middle and twitched faintly, or a dress that was blue, with the queerest effect of another color at the back of it, or perhaps the feeling of a torrent flowing there under a coat of ice, that might give way in little holes, so that your leg went in but not the whole of you.  Something, anyway, made him feel both small and heavy—­that awkward combination for a man accustomed to associate himself with cheerful but solid dignity.  In seating himself by request at a table, in what seemed to be a sort of kitchen, he experienced a singular sensation in the legs, and heard her say, as it might be to the air: 

“Biddy, dear, take Susie and Billy out.”

And thereupon a little girl with a sad and motherly face came crawling out from underneath the table, and dropped him a little courtesy.  Then another still smaller girl came out, and a very small boy, staring with all his eyes.