She always spoke proudly of her failings, as though there were a rapt press interviewer at her elbow, anxious to make a word-vignette about her.

Mr. Russell was thinking, and Kew was singing, so between them they forgot to shape the course of Christina due west. When they got outside London, they found themselves going south.

To go out of London was like going out of doors. The beauty of London is a dim beauty, and while you are in the middle of it you forget what it is like to see things clearly. In London every hour is a hill of adventure, and in the country every hour is a dimple in a quiet expanse of time.

The Family went out over the hills of Surrey, and between roadside trees they saw the crowned heads of the seaward downs. The horizon sank lower around them, the fields and woods circled and squared the ribs of the land.

Before sunset they had reached the little town that guards the gate in the wall of the Suss.e.x downs. They were welcomed by a thunderstorm, and by pa.s.sionate rain that drove them to the inn. Christina, torn between her pride of soul and her pride of paint, was obliged to edge herself into a shed which was already occupied by two cows and a red and blue waggon.

When the pursuers of Jay set their feet on the uneven floor of the inn, they recognised the place immediately as ideal. Its windows squinted, its floor made you feel as though you were drunk, its banisters reeled, its flights of stairs looked frequently round in an angular way at their own beginnings.

"How Arcadian!" said Mrs. Gustus, as she splashed her signature into the visitor's book. "One could be content to vegetate for ever here. Isn't it pathetic how one spends one's life collecting heart's desires, until one suddenly discovers that in having nothing and in desiring nothing lies happiness."

But when they had been shown their sitting-room, and had ordered their supper--lamb and early peas and gooseberry tart with _tons_ of cream--Mrs. Gustus saw the Ring, that great green breast of the country, against the broken evening sky, and said, "Now I see heights, and I shall never be happy or hungry till I have climbed them. The Lord made me so that I am never content until I am as near the sky as possible.

Silly, no doubt. But what a sky! Blood-red and pale pink, what a unique chord of colour."

"Same chord as the livery of the Bank or England," said Kew, who was hungry, and had an aching shoulder. He hated beauty talked, just as he hated poetry forced into print apropos of nothing. Even to hear the Psalms read aloud used to make him blush, before his honest orthodoxy hardened him.

Mrs. Gustus asked the lamb and gooseberry tart to delay their coming; she placed Cousin Gustus in an arm-chair, first wrapping him up because he felt cold, and then unwrapping him again because he felt hot; she kissed him good-bye.

"We shan't be more than an hour," she said. When Mrs. Gustus said an hour, she meant two. If she had meant an hour, she would have said twenty minutes. "You must watch for us to appear on the highest point of the Ring."

"Don't watch, but pray," murmured Kew. "There's that thunderstorm just working up to another display."

And so it was, but when they reached the ridge of down that led to the Ring, they were glad they had come. They were half-drowned, and half-blinded, and half-deafened, but there is a reward to every effort.

There was an enormous sky, and the sunlight spilled between the clouds to fall in pools upon the world. There was a chord made by many larks in the sky; the valleys held joy as a cup holds water. From the down the chalk-pits took great bites; the crinolined trees curtseyed down the slopes. The happy-coloured sea cut the world in half; the sight of a distant town at the corner of the river and the coast made one laugh for pleasure. There was a boat with sunlit sails creeping across the sea. I never see a boat on an utterly lonely sea without thinking of the secret stories that it carries, of the sun moving round that private world, of the shadows upon the deck that I cannot see, of the song of pa.s.sing seas that I cannot hear, of the night coming across a great horizon to devour it when I shall have forgotten it. Further off and more suggestive than a star, it seems to me.

A gust of sunlight struck the watchers, and pa.s.sed: they each ran a few steps towards the sight that pleased them most. And then they stood so long that Mr. Russell's Hound had time to make himself acquainted with every smell within twenty yards. He turned over a snail that sat--round and striped like a peppermint bull's-eye--on the short gra.s.s, he patted a little beetle that pushed its way across a world of disproportionate size, and then, by peevishly pulling the end of his whip which hung from Mr. Russell's pensive hand, he suggested that the pursuit should continue. So they walked to the crest of wood that stands at the top of the Ring, a compressed tabloid forest, fifty yards from side to side, as round as a florin piece.

The slopes rushed away from every side of it. There was a dark secret beneath those trees, there was a hint of very ancient love and still more ancient hatred. You could feel things beyond understanding, you left fact outside under the sky, and went in with a naked soul.

They walked across it in silence, well apart from each other. When they came out the other side, Mrs. Gustus said, "We must stay for a little while within reach of this. It has something ..."

Mr. Russell swallowed something that he had thought of saying, and instead drew his Hound's attention to a yellow square of mustard-field which made brilliant the distance.

Kew said nothing, but he felt choked with a lost remembrance of a very old childhood. He seemed to taste the quiet taste of youth here, there was even a feeling of going home through a damp evening to a nursery tea.

It was the nursery of all Secret Worlds. G.o.ds had been born there. No surprise could live there now, no wonder, no protest. The years like minutes fled between those trees, dynasties might fall during the singing of a bird. I think the thing that haunted the wood was a thing exactly as old and as romantic as the first child that tracked its Secret Friend across the floor of a forest.

Oh, friend of childlike mind, what is it that these two years have taken from us, what is it that we have lost, oh friend, besides contentment?

All the way home Kew sang very loudly the first tune he ever knew.

When the Family (including Mr. Russell) got back to the inn, the lamb and the gooseberry tart and Cousin Gustus were all waiting for them. But they were delayed in the hall. A stout young woman with a pleasant face of small vocabulary turned from the visitors' book and stopped Mrs. Gustus.

"Are you THE Mrs. Augustus Martin?" she asked.

"I am she," replied Anonyma. Her grammar in moments of emergency always impressed Kew.

I cannot say that Mrs. Gustus seemed surprised. She was the sort of person to hide even from herself the fact that this thing had never happened before. She remained perfectly calm as if repeating a hackneyed experience. Kew was astonished. Mr. Russell shared this feeling. Having a certain personal admiration for Mrs. Gustus, he had tried on more than one occasion to find pleasure in her books, but without success.

The stout young lady said nothing more than "Oh" for the moment, but she breathed it in such a manner that Mrs. Gustus saw at once the duty of asking her to dine with the Family.

When the admirer was introduced to Cousin Gustus, she said, "Oh, so this is your husband ..." and gazed on that melancholy man with eagerness.

When she saw Mr. Russell's Hound she said, "And this is your dog," and was about to crown him with a corresponding halo when Mrs. Gustus disclaimed the connection.

"It is wonderful to meet you, of all people, in this romantic place,"

said the admirer as she pursued her peas. "Do you know, whenever I finish one of your books, I feel so romantic I want to kiss everybody I meet.

Oh, those courtly heroes of yours!"

A heavy silence fell for a moment.

"And your descriptions of nature," continued the admirer. "That sunset seen from the west coast of Ireland that you describe in _The Courtship of Hartley Casey_. You must know Ireland very well."

"I have never been there," said Mrs. Gustus. "I evolve my scenery. After all, Nature lives in the heart of each one of us. I think we all have a sort of Secret World of our own, out of which all that is best in us comes. One does not need to see with one's outward eyes."

"Oh, goodness me, how true that is," said the admirer. "But you must write a book about the downs, won't you? Do you take notes on your travels?"

"My notebook is never out of my hand," answered Mrs. Gustus. "I jot down whatever occurs to me, wherever I may be. I write by moonlight in the night, I have had to pause in the middle of my prayers in Church, I have stood transfixed in the full flow of a London street. I always hope that people will think I am suddenly remembering that I forgot to order to-morrow's dinner."

But really she knew that no one could ever be deceived in the purpose of the notebook.

"Oh, mustn't it be wonderful!" breathed the admirer, and Cousin Gustus, who was always properly impressed by his wife when the example was set by strangers, nodded with a proprietary smile. "And are you writing now?"

she continued.

"I am always writing," said Mrs. Gustus, who had seldom enjoyed herself so much, "my pen never rests. A lifetime is too short to allow of rest.

But I am not here primarily for inspiration. We are on a quest."

"Oh, how romantic," moaned the admirer.

"It is a quest with a certain amount of romance in it," agreed Anonyma.

"We are seeking a House By The Sea. We know very little about it except that it exists. We know that its windows look west, and that the sun sets over the sea. We know that it stands ungardened on the cliff and has a great view. We know that it is seven hundred years old, and full of inspiration ..."

"We know," continued Kew, "that you can--and often do--drop a fishing-line out of the window into the sea when you are tired of playing the goldfish in the water-b.u.t.t. We know that the owner of the house is a rotten shot, and that the stone b.a.l.l.s from the bal.u.s.trade are not at this moment where they ought to be. We know that aeroplanes as well as seagulls nest in those cliffs...."

"We know--" began Mr. Russell, but this was too much for Mrs. Gustus.

After all, the lady was her admirer.

"What's all this?" said Mrs. Gustus. "What do you people know about it?"

"I just thought I would talk a little now," said Kew. "I get quickly tired of hearing other people giving information without help from me."

"At any rate, Russ," continued Mrs. Gustus, "you can't know anything whatever about the matter. You have hardly listened when I read Jay's letters."

"I told you that I remembered," said Mr. Russell. "I don't know how. I remember sitting on a high cliff and seeing three black birds swim in a row, and dive in a row, and in a row come up again after I had counted hundreds."

"Nonsense," said Mrs. Gustus, trying not to appear cross before the visitor, "you're thinking of something else. You can see such a sight as that at the Zoo any day."

"You all seem to know quite a lot about the place," said the admirer, "yet not much of a very practical nature, if I may say so."