moorings; now she was loose and adrift.
The sunshine gave way to chill; the daffodils were in shadow, dipping
silently. So they would dip through the day and the long cold night. So
strong in their frailty!
She rose, a little stiff, took a few daffodils, and went down. She
hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one or two to go with her.
She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she hated it,
especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this
wind.
When she got home Clifford asked her:
`Where did you go?'
`Right across the wood! Look, aren't the little daffodils adorable? To
think they should come out of the earth!'
`Just as much out of air and sunshine,' he said.
`But modelled in the earth,' she retorted, with a prompt contradiction,
that surprised her a little.
The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She followed the broad
riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called
John's Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower in the darkness
of larches. But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny
well-bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and clear it was!
Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles. She heard the
faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill. Even
above the hissing boom of the larchwood, that spread its bristling,
leafless, wolfish darkness on the down-slope, she heard the tinkle as of
tiny water-bells.
This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well must have
been a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no more. Its tiny cleared
space was lush and cold and dismal.
She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she heard a faint
tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering, or a
woodpecker? It was surely hammering.
She walked on, listening. And then she noticed a narrow track between
young fir-trees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But she felt it had
been used. She turned down it adventurously, between the thick young firs,
which gave way soon to the old oak wood. She followed the track, and the
hammering grew nearer, in the silence of the windy wood, for trees make a
silence even in their noise of wind.
She saw a secret little clearing, and a secret little hot made of
rustic poles. And she had never been here before! She realized it was the
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