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at once shivered with cold. It became suddenly obvious to her that the only possible time filler was a walk. She let in the clutch; the noise of the accelerating engine seemed shattering in the stillness.
    The car twisted downhill, between hedges in which the scent of the may was still quenched by dew and the chill of dawn; dropped into shadow in the valley, and climbed again. She turned off from her homeward road, and, slowing to an easy twenty, began to meander over the hills, looking about for a place to park.
    She found it at a white, five-barred gate into a larch wood, whose trees, thinly spaced, let in the sun. The gate gave on to a ride, evidently private land; but it was too early to feel very serious about trespassing, and, having had a country childhood, she could judge that the place was not heavily preserved. She opened the gate, closing it conscientiously behind her.
    The grass of the ride had the extreme velvety fineness which generations of rabbits create about their ancestral homes. It was a good morning for them; their sentinel ears pointed her approach, their white scuts bounced before her, and their jaunty young, losing their heads, took the longest way across the track before popping down into the green. Between padded mats of needles under the larches, bluebells lay in cloudy lakes and streams. Exercise was already making her warm.
    The ride gave out in a clearing, stubbled with cut bracken; through the rusty stalks the hard new shoots were uncurling in fantastic crooks and croziers and little fans, mixed with sparse hardy bluebells. The sun was beginning to have heat in its brightness. Hilary let herself down onto a heap of old bracken, and sighed with animal content. Her tweeds melted into the landscape like the protective coloring of a partridge or a hare; she felt, like one of them, comfortably and inconspicuously at home. The warmth began to make her healthily sleepy. She shut her eyes.
    It might have been after five minutes, or thirty-five, that she opened them again, with a start. Among the light rustlings and cracklings of small life in the undergrowth, a new noise, rhythmic and strong, was growing louder, the thud over turf of a cantering horse. It came from the ride she had left, facing her now across the clearing. She did not disturb herself about it; the wood was too dense behind her for anyone to ride that way, and, sunk in her form of bracken, it was unlikely that she would be seen. The hoofbeats slowed to a walk; a stick cracked quite near. In a dim curiosity to know whose solitude she was sharing, she raised herself a little.
    They came out into the lake of sunlight in the clearing, a big light dun, and a rider sitting loosely and at ease. Hilary stared, forgetting her trespass and the apologies she might need to improvise. She felt a little detached from reality. The light, the setting, the hour, seemed a theatrical extravagance, exaggerating, needlessly, what was already excessive, the most spectacularly beautiful human creature she had ever seen. Because her habit of mind had made her hostile to excess, she thought irritably, It’s ridiculous. It’s like an illustration to something.
    He had not seen her. If he came nearer, she would find that distance had been playing tricks. When he passed near enough for her to hear the creak of leather, she still did not quite believe in him. His boots and breeches, which were old and good, were topped off with a blue cotton shirt open at the neck; a carelessness natural to the hour, but transformed by its wearer to something traditional, the basic costume of equestrian romance. He was slender, but strongly boned. His hair was so black that the brightening sun did not touch it with brown; his face had the hard, faintly hollow planes in which art seems to have lost interest between the fourteenth century and the twentieth, the lines which invite not paint or marble, but stone or bronze. But sculpture would have missed the contrast of a fair skin and