“And catch cold! You careless boy. We’ll get to the top soon now.”
“Oh, this air is wonderful,” she said. “Just as if it had come straight out of the blue, all washed and clean.”
On the top of Uffdown where the cloak of pine droops to a hollow between the two peaks, they sat on a dry, yielding hedge-side, where the grass was thick as the fleece of a mountain sheep, and four lovely counties dreamed below them.
“Eddie,” she asked, half joking, “where does the west wind come from?”
“Oh, I don’t know, dearest—from Wales and the sea, I suppose.”
“Put your head close to mine and I’ll show you. . . . Those hills that look like mountains cut out of blue cardboard are the Malverns, and far, ever so far beyond them—yes, just to the left you see a level ridge that drops suddenly in the west. You don’t know what that is, Eddie, do you?”
“No—I don’t like to look at single things. I like to feel it’s all—what d’you call it?—all dreamy underneath one.”
“But you must look at that. It’s the mountain, Eddie, close to where I was born.”
“But I never knew that you could see it from here. You never told me.”
“You know why. I told you that I was never happy there. And now, you see, since the old people died and the land was sold, it really has nothing to do with us.”
“Still, it’s rather wonderful to be looking into—into another country. It is Wales, isn’t it?”
“Yes—part of it’s in Wales. Felindre is in England.”
“I’m rather glad I’m not half-Welsh, anyway,” he said. “But I wish I’d been there.”
“Do you?” she answered dreamily. “Yes—I wish we had been there together. It was a different sort of life. I thought—I just thought I should like to see it again.”
He was a little alarmed at the wistfulness in her voice.
“Nothing, Eddie, nothing. It was another life.”
She put her arms round his neck and pulled him gently to her. He was content to lie there, with his head on her breast, while she talked in a low voice of that distant place and of her own childhood. He listened in a dream and did not speak at all until she began to tell him a long story which the Felindre shepherd, Morgan, had told her when she was a child. Then Edwin opened his eyes and stopped her.
“Dearest, I know that story,” he said. “Oh, go on, it’s wonderful. . . .”