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with it!'"
Both stood motionless, gazing over the wide stretch of country--wood beyond wood, distance beyond distance, that lay between them and the Welsh border. Suddenly, as a shaft of light from the descending sun fled ghostlike across the plain, touching trees and fields and farms in its path, two noble towers emerged among the shadows--characters, as it were, that gave a meaning to the scroll of nature. They were the towers of Markborough Cathedral. Meynell pointed to them as he turned to his companion, his face still quivering under the strain of feeling.
"Take the omen! It is for them, in a sense--a spiritual sense--we are fighting. They belong not to any body of men that may chance to-day to call itself the English Church. They belong to _England_--in her aspect of faith--and to the English people!"
There was a silence. His look came back to her face, and the prophetic glow died from his own. "I should be very, very sorry"--he said anxiously--"if anything I have said had given you pain."
Mary shook her head.
"No--not to me. I--I have my own thoughts. But one must think--of others." Her voice trembled.
The words seemed to suggest everything that in her own personal history had stamped her with this sweet, shrinking look. Meynell was deeply touched. But he did not answer her, or pursue the conversation any farther. He gathered a great bunch of harebells for her, from the sun-warmed dells in the heather; and was soon making her laugh by his stories of colliery life and speech, _à propos_ of the colliery villages fringing the plain at their feet.
* * * * *
The stream, as they neared it, proved to be the boundary between the heath land and the pastures of the lower ground. It ran fresh and brimming between its rushy banks, shadowed here and there by a few light ashes and alders, but in general open to the sky, of which it was the mirror. It shone now golden and blue under the deepening light of the afternoon; and two or three hundred yards