We are only shadows that pass.

But England lives always--always--and shall live!" And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet country scene.
The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun to inhabit stood upon an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north and east and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over and sheltered by the downs.

Pastures studded with trees sloped away from the house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary woods; only the church tower emerged.

From the deep oriel window where she sat Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its mellowed red brick, its Jacobean windows and roof.

She could see also a corner of the moat with its running stream, a moat much older than the building it encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal garden planned in the days of John Evelyn--with its fountain and its sundial, and its beds in arabesque.