The wind was gentler now, and a very curious diffusion of thin, watery, greenish light seemed to have melted into the grey stretches of sky above their heads. The immense Somersetshire plain, with patches of olive-green marshland and patches of moss-green meadow-land, lost itself in a pale, sad horizon, where, like a king’s sepulchre, rose the hill-ruin of Glastonbury. The path by which Gerda guided him down to the valley was indeed an ideal one for two companions who desired no interruption. Starting from a pheasants’ “drive” in the lower half of the hazel-copse, it wound its way down the incline along a series of grassy terraces dotted by patches of young bracken-fronds that had only very recently sprouted up among the great dead brown leaves.

Arrived at the foot of the hill, they struck a narrow cattle-drove where the deep winter-ditches were still full of water and where huge half-fallen willow-trunks lay across old lichen-covered palings.