Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n "PIEECTLY after a hurried and early lunch -J next day, Margarita went to the little room off the hall where the Channing family kept an assortment of cricket bats, tennis rackets, fishing rods and other tackle, oars, sou'westers, leggings, sticks, and outdoor clothes. She took a light sweater, pulled a tam-o'-shanter over her head, whistled to her too-fat terrier, and went out by a door opening on to the terrace. Climbing the low stone wall, she crossed the bare rose garden and set her face to the moor. It was an afternoon as warm as high summer, the country flooded with golden light, soft billows and pearly clouds massed like mountains on the horizon. As she emerged on to the road she came face to face with John Ware. "Are you going for a walk? May I come with you?" For a moment she was inclined to say no; she wanted to be alone, to escape for a little while from all this endless discussion, to spend a few hours with her beloved moors before she had to part with them. And this was a stranger. But looking into his face she found some quality that subtracted strangeness, melted her defense; she liked his rather long, fair face, his close-lipped, clear-eyed quietude, his air of ironical cool sweetness. Here was something serene and kind, secure and comradely. She smiled at him: "I am going a long way, and perhaps in your tropics you have forgotten how to walk." "Perhaps. But try me." He turned to her side and they walked in silence for a minute. "I'll tell you what I thought of doing," she told him presently, as they reached the highway. "The moors near here are not high enough for me to-day; I wanted to get up into the wind. I thought I'd take the two-ten train and get off at a little place I know at the foot of those hills— over there—and climb to the top of a fav...