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A great lawn spread between the border and the house; it was still very threadbare owing to the patriotic pasturage that, during the last years of the War, it had afforded to half a dozen sheep, but it was darned in so many places by the rich, dark silk of clover leaves as almost to be turned into a new fabric.

Well, then, the view and border lay simmering in the late sunshine. A horse was dragging a plough against the sky-line, and here and there thin streams of smoke were rising from heaps of smouldering weeds. In the nearer fields, Teresa could discern small, moving objects of a dazzling whiteness—white leghorns gleaning the stubble; and from time to time there reached her the noise of a distant shot, heralding a supper of roast hare or partridge in some secluded farm-house. Then, like a Danish vessel bound for pillage in Mercia, white, swift, compact, a flock of wood pigeons would flash through the air to alight in a far away field and rifle the corn.

But so pintado was the view, so under the notion of art, that these movements across its surface gave one an æsthetic shock such as one would experience before a mechanical device introduced into a painting, and, at the same time, thrilled the imagination, as if the door in a picture should suddenly open, or silver strains proceed from the painted shepherd’s pipe.