Beyond the forest land a lower ridge of hills rose up, and over that ridge one saw the spires of Chichester and the level flats of Selsea reaching to the sea.
Into this garden Chayne came on the next afternoon, and as he walked along its paths alone he could almost fancy that his dead father paced with the help of his stick at his side, talking, as had been his wont, of this or that improvement needed by the farms, pointing out to him a meadow in the hollow beneath which might soon be coming into the market, and always ending up with the same plea.
"Isn't it time, Hilary, that you married and came home to look after it all yourself ?" Chayne had turned a deaf ear to that plea, but it made its appeal to him to-night.

Wherever his eyes rested, he recaptured something of his boyhood; the country-side was alive with memories.

He looked south, and remembered how the perished cities of history had acquired reality for him by taking on the aspect of Chichester lying low there on the flats; and how the spires of the fabled towns of his storybooks had caught the light of the setting sun, just as did now the towers of the cathedral.
Eastward, in the dip between the shoulder of the downs, and the trees of Arundel Park, a long black hedge stood out with a remarkable definition against the sky--the hedge of which he had spoken to Sylvia--the great dark wall of brambles guarding the precincts of the Sleeping Beauty.

He recalled the adventurous day when he had first ridden alone upon his pony along the great back of the downs and had come down to it through a sylvan country of silence and ferns and open spaces; and had discovered it to be no more than a hedge waist-high.

The dusk came upon him as he loitered in that solitary garden; the lights shone out in cottage and farm-house; and more closely still his memories crowded about him weaving spells.