They had left the streets, and were pursuing a road bordered with gardens, gardens of glowing colour, sheltered amid great laurels, shadowed by stately trees; the air was laden with warm scents of flower and leaf.  On an instinct of resistance, Nancy pretended that the exact sciences were her favourite study.  She said it in the tone of superiority which habit had made natural to her in speaking of intellectual things.  And Tarrant appeared to accept her declaration without scepticism; but, a moment after, he turned the talk upon novels.

Thus, for half an hour and more, they strolled on by upward ways, until Teignmouth lay beneath them, and the stillness of meadows all about.  Presently Tarrant led from the beaten road into a lane all but overgrown with grass.  He began to gather flowers, and offered them to Nancy.  Personal conversation seemed at an end; they were enjoying the brilliant sky and the peaceful loveliness of earth.  They exchanged simple, natural thoughts, or idle words in which was no thought at all.

Before long, they came to an old broken gate, half open; it was the entrance to a narrow cartway, now unused, which descended windingly between high thick hedges.  Ruts of a foot in depth, baked hard by summer, showed how miry the track must be in the season of rain.

‘This is our way,’ said Tarrant, his hand on the lichened wood.  ‘Better than the pier or the promenade, don’t you think?’

‘But we have gone far enough.’

Nancy drew back into the lane, looked at her flowers, and then shaded her eyes with them to gaze upward.

’Almost.  Another five minutes, and you will see the place I told you of.  You can’t imagine how beautiful it is.’

‘Another day—­’

‘We are all but there—­’

He seemed regretfully to yield; and Nancy yielded in her turn.  She felt a sudden shame in the thought of having perhaps betrayed timidity.  Without speaking, she passed the gate.

The hedge on either side was of hazel and dwarf oak, of hawthorn and blackthorn, all intertwined with giant brambles, and with briers which here and there met overhead.  High and low, blackberries hung in multitudes, swelling to purple ripeness.  Numberless the trailing and climbing plants.  Nancy’s skirts rustled among the greenery; her cheeks were touched, as if with a caress, by many a drooping branchlet; in places, Tarrant had to hold the tangle above her while she stooped to pass.

And from this they emerged into a small circular space, where the cartway made a turn at right angles and disappeared behind thickets.  They were in the midst of a plantation; on every side trees closed about them, with a low and irregular hedge to mark the borders of the grassy road.  Nancy’s eyes fell at once upon a cluster of magnificent foxgloves, growing upon a bank which rose to the foot of an old elm; beside the foxgloves lay a short-hewn trunk, bedded in the ground, thickly overgrown with mosses, lichens, and small fungi.