140 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



as she walked, the light was dimmed by the clusters of 

 cool white humming cherry-blossom hanging out of the 

 hot sky. In front of her the cherry-trees seemed to meet 

 and make a corridor of dark stems on either hand, paved 

 green and white and gold, and roofed by milky white 

 clouds that embowered the clear, wild warble of black- 

 caps. Farther on, the flowers ceased and the grass was 

 shadowed by new-leaved beeches, and at length in- 

 volved in an uncertain mist of trees and shadows of trees, 

 and there the cuckoo cried. For the child there was no 

 end to the path. 



She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, 

 or stooping to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over 

 it to the ground; but soon she was content only to brush 

 the tips of the flowers with her outstretched hands, or, 

 rising on tiptoe, to force her head up amongst the lowest 

 branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing at all 

 but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, 

 dimly foreknowing her life's days. She looked forward 

 as one day she would look back over a broad sea of years, 

 and in a drowsy, haunted gloom, full of the cuckoo's 

 note, saw herself going always on and on among the 

 interlacing shadows of tree trunks and branches and joys 

 and pleasures and pains and sorrows that must have an 

 end, she knew not how. She stopped, not venturing into 

 that strange future under the beeches. She stared into 

 the mist, where hovered the phantoms of the big girl, the 

 young woman, the lover . . . which in turn she was to 

 become. Under the last cherry-tree something went out 

 of her into the shadow, and those phantoms fed upon her 

 blood as she stood still. But presently in the long beech 

 corridors the gloom began to lighten and move and change 



