Then, as the sound of wheels drew nearer, she rose and went towards the party.
* * * * * The party from Chetworth soon perceived Elizabeth's approach.

'So this is the learned lady ?' said the Captain in Pamela's ear.

She had brought him in her pony-carriage so far, as he was not yet able for much physical exertion, and he and Beryl were to walk back from Holme Wood Hill.
He put up his eye-glass, and examined the figure as it came nearer.
'She's just come up, I suppose, from the farm,' said Pamela, pointing to some red roofs among the trees, in the wide hollow below the hill.
'"Athene Ageleie"!' murmured the Major, who had been proxime for the Ireland, and a Balliol man.

'She holds herself well--beautiful hair!' 'Beryl, this is Miss Bremerton,' said Aubrey Mannering, with a cordial ring in his voice, as he introduced his fiancee to Elizabeth.

The two shook hands, and Elizabeth thought the girl's manner a little stand-off, and wondered why.
The pony had soon been tied up, and the party spread themselves on the grass of the hill-side; for Holme Wood Hill was a famous point of view, and the sunny peace of the afternoon invited loitering.
For miles to the eastward spread an undulating chalk plain, its pale grey or purplish soil showing in the arable fields where the stubbles were just in process of ploughing, its monotony broken by a vast wood of oak and beech into which the hill-side ran down--a wood of historic fame, which had been there when Senlac was fought, had furnished ship-timber for the Armada, and sheltered many a cavalier fugitive of the Civil Wars.
The wood indeed, which belonged to the Squire, was a fragment of things primeval.