He halted, leaning on his stick. He was on the edge of the
Plain: below him stretched away a great half-ring of cultivated
country, its saliencies the square tower of a church jutting over
a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale
haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange--the
tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years.
On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an
alien. It touched him, but to revolt. More than a child of the
soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also
as an oppression, a limitation: an ordered littleness from which
world-interests were excluded. He was a lover of art and a
cosmopolitan, and though the lowland landscape was itself a piece
of art, and perfect in its way, Hyde's mind found no home in it.
Yet, he reflected with his tolerant smile, he had fought for it,
and was ready any day to fight for it again--for stability and
tradition, the Game Laws, the Established Church, and the
rotation of crops. He was the son of an English mother and had
received the training of an Englishman. A rather cynical smile,
now and then, at the random and diffident ways of England was the
only freedom he allowed to the foreign strain within him.

And when he looked the other way even this faint feeling of
irritation passed off, blown away by the wind that always blows
across a moor, thin and sweet now, and sunlit as the light curled
clouds that it carried overhead through the profound June blue.
Acres upon acres of pale sward, sown all over with the blue of
scabious and the lemon-yellow of hawkweed, stretched away in
rolling undulations like the plain of the sea; dense woods hung
massed on the far horizon, beech-woods, sapphire blue beyond the
pale silver and amber, of the middle distance, and under them a