The low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right, the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its greedy nose in search of the grains of corn among the cobbles; to his left a gray stone bridge over a broad light-filled river; beyond, a little huddled village backed by and apparently built out of the great slate quarry which represented the only industry of the neighborhood, and a tiny towered church--the scene on the Sabbath of Mr.Mayhew's ministrations.

Beyond the village, shoulders of purple fell, and behind the inn masses of broken crag rising at the very head of the valley into a fine pike, along whose jagged edges the rain-clouds were trailing.
There was a little lurid storm-light on the river, but, in general, the color was all dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and purple background.

He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily, trying to fix it there forever.
Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting tea spread in a light-upper room, where Agnes and Rose were already making fun of the chromo-lithographs and rummaging the visitors' book.

The scrambling, chattering meal passed like a flash.

At the beginning of it Mrs.
Thornburgh's small gray eyes had travelled restlessly from face to face, as though to say, 'What--_no_ news yet?
Nothing happened ?' As for Elsmere, though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest moments of existence, he remembered little afterward but the scene: the peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just opened for the summer season, a print of the Princess of Wales on the wall opposite him, a stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, Rose's golden head, and heavy amber necklace, and the figure at the vicar's right, in a gown of a little dark blue check, the broad hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes.
When tea was over they lounged out onto the bridge.