You remember that one side of the valley in which stood New Wanley was clad with trees.  Through this wood a public path made transverse ascent to the shoulder of the bill, a way little used save by Wanley ramblers in summer time.  The section of the wood above the path was closed against trespassers; among the copses below anyone might freely wander.  In places it was scarcely possible to make a way for fern, bramble, and underwood, but elsewhere mossy tracks led one among hazels or under arches of foliage which made of the mid-day sky a cool, golden shimmer.  One such track, abruptly turning round a great rock over the face of which drooped the boughs of an ash, came upon a little sloping lawn, which started from a high hazel-covered bank.  The bank itself was so shaped as to afford an easy seat, shaded even when the grass in front was all sunshine.

Adela had long known this retreat, and had been accustomed to sit here with Letty, especially when she needed to exchange deep confidences with her friend.  Once, just as they were settling themselves upon the bank, they were startled by a movement among the leaves above, followed by the voice of someone addressing them with cheerful friendliness, and making request to be allowed to descend and join them.  It was Hubert Eldon, just home for the long vacation.  Once or twice subsequently the girls had met Hubert on the same spot; there had been a picnic here, too, in which Mrs. Eldon and Mrs. Waltham took part.  But Adela always thought of the place as peculiarly her own.  To others it was only a delightfully secluded corner of the wood, fresh and green; for her it had something intimately dear, as the haunt where she had first met her own self face to face and had heard the whispering of secrets as if by another voice to her tremulous heart.

She sat here one morning in July, six months after her marriage.  It was more than a year since she had seen the spot, and on reaching it to-day it seemed to her less beautiful than formerly; the leafage was to her eyes thinner and less warm of hue than in earlier years, the grass had a coarser look and did not clothe the soil so completely.  An impulse had brought her hither, and her first sense on arriving had been one of disappointment.  Was the change in her way of seeing? or had the retreat indeed suffered, perchance from the smoke of New Wanley?  The disappointment was like that we experience in revisiting a place kept only in memory since childhood.  Adela had not travelled much in the past year, but her growth in experience had put great tracts between her and the days when she came here to listen and wonder.  It was indeed a memory of her childhood that led her into the wood.