Description

In the grey of the summer evening, as the sunset faded and the twilight gathered, spreading itself tenderly over the pastures and cornfields, -- over the purple-green glooms of the fir forest -- over the open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the cottager and squatter -- over the clear, brown streams that trickle out of the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and rigor as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village street -- and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and glossy foliage of the self-sown hollies spring up between the roots of the beech trees, where plovers cry, and stoat and weasel lurk and scamper, while the old poacher's lean, ill-favored, rusty-colored lurcher picks up a shrieking hare, and where wandering bands of gypsies -- those lithe, onyx-eyed children of the magic East -- still pitch their dirty, little, funguslike tents around the campfire, -- as the sunset died and the twilight thus softly widened and deepened, Lady Calmady found herself, for the first time during all the long summer day, alone. . . .