Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/58

 hunting, seemed to have more in it than all their pictures put together. Once or twice, it was true, in looking at a great picture, Jill had felt herself brushed for a moment by a sense of mystery; by the sense that here indeed something had happened, something been shown to her that, face to face with nature, by herself, she would never have seen. Dick's pictures, strange, queer, even ugly as she found them, had given her that feeling once or twice; especially this last picture he had just finished of the great river and the plains and cliffs seen from the mountain-pass. But the picture could never give all that went with the visual experience. It did not give the feeling of the wind upon one's cheek, or the scent of bracken in the air, or the sound of birds and insects, of brooks and branches stirring; it was less; not more; so why try? why butt one's head? So Jill came back to it again. And it was amusing to know that where they all felt Dick great and waited expectantly for him to tell them something of his secret, to her his meaning and his worth consisted in being like the branch of bramble.

It was not till after dinner when, for their last evening, they had gone outside to the balcony, that Jill's thoughts again turned to the Manoir and its occupants.

'Isn't it odious to think of that poor old woman all alone up there, Dick?' she said, looking over the mysterious spaces of the river to the darkling cliff.

Dick's eyes rested on her. He was not thinking of the old lady. He would never think of her unless she