Page:Crawford - Love in idleness.djvu/181

 little ditch separated it from the highway. On the hillside, above this stretch of grass, the trees grew here and there, wide apart at first, and then by degrees more close together. He himself was seated just within the thick wood, at the edge of the first underbrush.

Now and then, people passed along the road: a light buckboard drawn by a pair of bays and containing a smart-looking couple, with no groom behind; a farmer's wagon, long, hooded, and dusty, dragged at a disjointed trot by a broken-down grey horse; a solitary rider, whose varnished shoes reflected the sunlight even to where Lawrence was sitting; a couple of pedestrians; a lad driving a cow; and then another buckboard; and so on.

Lawrence was thinking of shutting up his book and climbing higher up the steep side of New port Mountain—as the hill is called—in search of another study, when, glancing down through the trees, he saw three riders coming slowly along the road—two in front, and one at some distance behind—a lady and gentleman and then a groom. His eyes were good, and he would have known