“Yes,” said Howard, “that is the strange thing.  It does seem so simple and tranquil! and yet one knows that down there people have their troubles and anxieties—­people are ill, are dying—­are wondering what it all means, why they are set just there, and why they have so short a time to stay!”

“I suppose it all fits into itself,” said Maud, “somehow or other.  I don’t think that life really contradicts itself!”

“I don’t know,” said Howard, with a sudden access of dreariness; “that is exactly what it does seem to do—­that’s the misery of it!”

The girl looked at him but did not speak; he gave her an uneasy smile, and she presently turned away and looked over her father’s map.

They went down and lunched on a green bank among the fern, under some old oaks.  The sunlight fell among the glades; a flock of tits, chirruping and hunting, rushed past them and plunged downward into the wood.  They could hear a dove in the high trees near them, crooning a song of peace and infinite content.  Mr. Sandys, stung by emulation, related a long story, interspersed with imitations, of his undergraduate days; and Howard was content to sit and seem to listen, and to watch the light pierce downwards into the silent woodland.  An old woodman, grey and bent and walking painfully, in great leather gloves and gaiters, carrying a chopper, passed slowly along the ride and touched his hat.  Jack insisted on giving him some of the luncheon, and made up a package for him which the old man put away in a pocket, making some remarks about the weather, and adding with a senile pride that he was over seventy, and had worked in the woodland for sixty years and more.  He was an almost mediaeval figure, Howard thought—­a woodman five centuries ago would have looked and spoken much the same; he knew nothing of the world, or the thoughts and hopes of it; he was almost as much of the soil as the very woods themselves, in his dim mechanical life; was man made for that after all?  How did that square with Miss Merry’s eager optimism?  What was the meaning of so unconscious a figure, so obviously without an ethical programme, and yet so curiously devised by God, patiently nurtured and preserved?

In the infinite peace, while the flies hummed on the shining bracken, and the breeze nestled in the firs like a falling sea, Howard had a spasm of incredulous misery.  Could any heart be so heavy, so unquiet as his own?—­life suddenly struck so aimless, with but one overmastering desire, which he could not fulfil.  He was shocked at his feebleness.  A year ago he could have devised no sweeter or more delicious day than this, with such a party, in the high sunlit wood. . . .

The imitations began again.

“I don’t believe there’s anyone you could not imitate!” said Mr. Sandys rapturously.

“Oh, it’s only a knack,” said Guthrie, “but some people are easier than others.”

Howard bestirred himself to express some interest.