Life was good here, away from the old faces and the old pursuits. She
had been at Paradise only two weeks, but they had been weeks of sun and
soft winds and sweet smells, and the impressionable surface of her mind,
that beneath was so shallow and so unmalleable, was gradually responding
to the influences around her.

Almost imperceptibly to herself her point of view had been changing; a
group of white foxgloves, like ghost-flames, that she had seen in a
coppice, the creeping of a bright eyed shrew mouse through last year's
leaves at her feet, the hundreds of little rabbits with curved-in backs
that ran with their curious rocking action over the dewy fields at
evening--all these things gave her a shock of pleasure so keen it
surprised her. Till now she had not admitted her own artificiality even
to herself; now that she was regaining directness she told herself she
could afford to be more candid.

Nearly every day she and Ishmael, with Vassie and sometimes Killigrew or
Judy, or even the Parson, would go on long expeditions to the cromlechs
and carns of the country around; but sometimes she and Ishmael would
slip away together, defying convention, sometimes on foot, sometimes in
a light market-gig--casual wanderings with no fixed goal, and
inexpressibly delightful to both. On sunny days they put up the pony at
some farm, and lay upon the short, warm grass of a cliff-face watching
the foam patterns form and dissolve again beneath a diamond scatter of
spray. When the sea-mist rolled up steadily over Cloom like blown smoke,
here opaque, there gossamer-thin, they would sally forth and tramp the
spongy moors, the ground sobbing beneath their feet and the mournful
calling of the gulls sounding in their heedless ears. And all the while
her turns of head and throat, the inflections of her low, rich voice,