Farmer Pammenter was talkative, and his honest chest. voice sounded pleasantly; but the matter of his discourse might have been more cheerful.  Here, as elsewhere, the evil of the times was pressing upon men and disheartening them from labour.  Farms lying barren, ill-will between proprietor and tenant, between tenant and hind, departure of the tillers of the soil to rot in towns that have no need of them—­of such things did honest Pammenter speak, with many a sturdy malediction of landlords and land-laws, whereat Sidney smiled, not unsympathetic.

Danbury Hill, rising thick-wooded to the village church, which is visible for miles around, with stretches of heath about its lower slopes, with its far prospects over the sunny country, was the pleasant end of a pleasant drive.  Mrs. Pammenter and her children (seven of them, unhappily) gave the party a rough, warm-hearted welcome.  Ha! how good it was to smell the rooms through which the pure air breathed freely!  All the front of the house was draped with purple clematis; in the garden were sun-flowers and hollyhocks and lowly plants innumerable; on the red and lichened tiles pigeons were cooing themselves into a doze; the horse’s hoofs rang with a pleasant clearness on the stones as he was led to his cool stable.  Her heart throbbing with excess of delight, Jane pushed back the diamond-paned casement of her bedroom, the same room she had occupied last year and the year before, and buried her face in clematis.  Then the tea that Mrs. Pammenter had made ready;—­how delicious everything tasted! how white the cloth was! how fragrant the cut flowers in the brown jug!

But Michael had found the journey a greater tax upon his strength than he anticipated.  Whilst Sidney and Jane talked merrily over the tea-table the old man was thinking.  ’Another year they will come without me,’ and he smiled just to hide his thoughts.  In the evening he smoked his pipe on a garden-seat, for the most part silent, and at sunset he was glad to go up to his chamber.

Jane was renewing her friendship with the Pammenters’ eldest girl, an apple-checked, red-haired, ungraceful, but good-natured lass of sixteen.  Their voices sounded from all parts of the garden and the farm-yard, Jane’s clear-throated laugh contrasting with the rougher utterance of her companion.  After supper, in the falling of the dusk, Sidney strolled away from the gossiping circle within-doors, and found a corner of the garden whence there was a view of wooded hillside against the late glow of the heavens.  Presently he heard footsteps, and through the leafage of a tree that shadowed him he saw Jane looking this way and that, as if she sought some one.  Her dress was a light calico, and she held in her hand a rough garden hat, the property of Miss Pammenter.  Sidney regarded her for some moments, then called her by name.  She could not see him at first, and looked about anxiously.  He moved a branch of the tree and again called her; whereupon she ran forward.