No breeze stirred the twigs overhead or the undergrowth through which they rode.

Once, as the two, riding a little apart, turned suddenly together, up a ravine into thicker woods, they came upon a herd of deer, who stared on them without any movement that the eye could see.
Here a stag stood with two hinds beside him; behind, Robin saw the backs and heads of others that lay still.

Only the beasts kept their eyes upon them, as they went, watching, as if it were a picture only that went by.
So, by little and little, the breeze stirred like a waking man; cocks crew from over the hills one to the other; dogs barked far away, till the face of the world was itself again, and the smoke from Matstead rose above the trees in front.
Robin had ridden in the dawn an hundred times before; yet never before had he so perceived that strange deliberateness and sleep of the world; and he had ridden, too, perhaps twenty times at such an hour, with his father beside him, after mass on some such occasion.

Yet it seemed to him this time that it was the mass which he had seen, and his own solitariness, that had illuminated his eyes.

It was dreadful to him--and yet it threw him more than ever on himself and God--that his father would ride with him so no more.