I have seen blood-spillings and down-crushings and abject defeat here and there in my time, but the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless tragedy.”  He was silent for a moment as if he were again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in his childhood’s imagination.  “Tell me some of the things you have seen in your time,” was the request that was nearly on Elaine’s lips, but she hastily checked herself and substituted another.

“Tell me more about the farm, please.”

And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several intermingled worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the hills, of beast lore and wood lore and farm craft, at times touching almost the border of witchcraft—­passing lightly here, not with the probing eagerness of those who know nothing, but with the averted glance of those who fear to see too much.  He told her of those things that slept and those that prowled when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as curious and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they tended.  It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of old-world children’s books had been fetched down from some cobwebbed lumber-room and brought to life.  Sitting there in the little paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and rank grasses, and shadowed by the weather-beaten old grey barn, listening to this chronicle of wonderful things, half fanciful, half very real, she could scarcely believe that a few miles away there was a garden-party in full swing, with smart frocks and smart conversation, fashionable refreshments and fashionable music, and a fevered undercurrent of social strivings and snubbings.  Did Vienna and the Balkan Mountains and the Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or invented this wonderful fairyland?  Was it a true and merciful arrangement of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust out the after-taste of the things that had been?  Here was one who had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and lost it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with the little wayside corner of the world into which he had crept.  And Elaine, who held so many desirable things in the hollow of her hand, could not make up her mind to be even moderately happy.  She did not even know whether to take this hero of her childhood down from his pedestal, or to place him on a higher one; on the whole she was inclined to resent rather than approve the idea that ill-health and misfortune could so completely subdue and tame an erstwhile bold and roving spirit.

The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience; the paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent grazing, had not thrust out the image of her own comfortable well-foddered loose-box.  Elaine divested her habit of some remaining crumbs of bun-loaf and jumped lightly on to her saddle.  As she rode slowly down the lane, with Keriway escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had seemed to her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old farmstead, a place of bee-hives and hollyhocks and gabled cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a magic city, with an undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.