I smiled at her simulated anxiety for my safety, and set forth when it was very dark but under a fine starry sky.  The silence, too, was very profound:  there was no good-bye from crowing cock or hooting owl on this occasion, nor did any cyclist pass me on the road with a flash of light from his lamp and a tinkle from his bell.  The long straight road on the high down was a dim grey band visible but a few yards before me, lying across the intense blackness of the earth.  By day I prefer as a rule walking on the turf, but this road had a rare and peculiar charm at this time.  It was now the season when the bird’s-foot-trefoil, one of the commonest plants of the downland country, was in its fullest bloom, so that in many places the green or grey-green turf as far as one could see on every side was sprinkled and splashed with orange-yellow.  Now this creeping, spreading plant, like most plants that grow on the close-cropped sheep-walks, whose safety lies in their power to root themselves and live very close to the surface, yet must ever strive to lift its flowers into the unobstructed light and air and to overtop or get away from its crowding neighbours.  On one side of the road, where the turf had been cut by the spade in a sharp line, the plant had found a rare opportunity to get space and light and had thrust out such a multitude of bowering sprays, projecting them beyond the turf, as to form a close band or rope of orange-yellow, which divided the white road from the green turf, and at one spot extended unbroken for upwards of a mile.  The effect was so singular and pretty that I had haunted this road for days for the pleasure of seeing that flower border made by nature.  Now all colour was extinguished:  beneath and around me there was a dimness which at a few yards’ distance deepened to blackness, and above me the pale dim blue sky sprinkled with stars; but as I walked I had the image of that brilliant band of yellow colour in my mind.

By and by the late moon rose, and a little later the east began to grow lighter and the dark down to change imperceptibly to dim hoary green.  Then the exquisite colours of the dawn once more, and the larks rising in the dim distance—­a beautiful unearthly sound—­and so in the end I came to “The Stones,” rejoicing, in spite of a cloud which now appeared on the eastern horizon to prevent the coming sun from being seen, that I had the place to myself.  The rejoicing came a little too soon; a very few minutes later other visitors on foot and on bicycles began to come in, and we all looked at each other a little blankly.  Then a motorcar arrived, and two gentlemen stepped out and stared at us, and one suddenly burst out laughing.

“I see nothing to laugh at!” said his companion a little severely.

The other in a low voice made some apology or explanation which I failed to catch.  It was, of course, not right; it was indecent to laugh on such an occasion, for we were not of the ebullient sort who go to “The Stones” at three o’clock in the morning “for a lark”; but it was very natural in the circumstances, and mentally I laughed myself at the absurdity of the situation.  However, the laugher had been rebuked for his levity, and this incident over, there was nothing further to disturb me or any one in our solemn little gathering.