Until later, when the “picking” had fairly begun, the kilns would not be at work; but there was some interest even now in going over the ground for the first time.

“I have never been inside an oast house,” she said; “Bolter is going to show me his, and explain technicalities.”

“May I come with you?” he asked.

There was a change in him.  Something had lighted in his eyes since the day before, when he had told her his story of Red Godwyn.  She wondered what it was.  They went together over the place, escorted by Bolter.  They looked into the great circular ovens, on whose floors the hops would be laid for drying, they mounted ladder-like steps to the upper room where, when dried, the same hops would lie in soft, light piles, until pushed with wooden shovels into the long “pokes” to be pressed and packed into a solid marketable mass.  Bolter was allowed to explain the technicalities, but it was plain that Mount Dunstan was familiar with all of them, and it was he who, with a sentence here and there, gave her the colour of things.

“When it is being done there is nearly always outside a touch of the sharp sweetness of early autumn,” he said “The sun slanting through the little window falls on the pale yellow heaps, and there is a pungent scent of hops in the air which is rather intoxicating.”

“I am coming later to see the entire process,” she answered.

It was a mere matter of seeing common things together and exchanging common speech concerning them, but each was so strongly conscious of the other that no sentence could seem wholly impersonal.  There are times when the whole world is personal to a mood whose intensity seems a reason for all things.  Words are of small moment when the mere sound of a voice makes an unreasonable joy.

“There was that touch of sharp autumn sweetness in the air yesterday morning,” she said.  “And the chaplets of briony berries that look as if they had been thrown over the hedges are beginning to change to scarlet here and there.  The wild rose-haws are reddening, and so are the clusters of berries on the thorn trees and bushes.”

“There are millions of them,” Mount Dunstan said, “and in a few weeks’ time they will look like bunches of crimson coral.  When the sun shines on them they will be wonderful to see.”

What was there in such speeches as these to draw any two nearer and nearer to each other as they walked side by side—­to fill the morning air with an intensity of life, to seem to cause the world to drop away and become as nothing?  As they had been isolated during their waltz in the crowded ballroom at Dunholm Castle, so they were isolated now.  When they stood in the narrow green groves of the hop garden, talking simply of the placing of the bins and the stripping and measuring of the vines, there might have been no human thing within a hundred miles—­within a thousand.  For the first time his height and strength conveyed to her an impression of physical