stony field. Suddenly she grasped his arm and for the first time terror sharpened her voice. 

"Oh! oh! see those cows! Oh, don't you see them? Go back! Go back!" 

Antony shook her off impatiently and grazed a stump on the right only to bump against a jagged boulder on the left. The car was undoubtedly moving more slowly; he could swear to it. 

"I believe it is an established fact that the cow is not carnivorous," he observed, peering in spirit to the limits of the field and wondering if he could turn in case a stone wall threatened. 

"I am going to jump," she announced quietly, and a spasm of fear shot through him remembering the pointed stubble and the flinty rocks. 

67 "Listen," he commanded, "and try not to be a little idiot. What harm can a cow do you? Or if it could"--with a burst of inspiration--"why should you throw yourself into the middle of them--perhaps with a broken leg?" 

67

A smothered gasp told him that this shot had told, and he drove on grimly; the nearly obliterated track led straight into the nibbling herd. As the monstrous, labouring chariot neared them they lifted their heads, stared gloomily a moment, and lumbered off, herding into a clumsy canter as the unknown enemy gained on them. Stunted firs rose here and there beside the track; the wheels crushed the smaller stumps now, and tipped more alarmingly as they took the unavoidable stones. They two might have been the first (or last) of human pairs in all the world, for they rode utterly alone between the dun earth and the blue sky. Each moment Antony expected to wake, gripping the sheets, and each moment this dreamlike progress, this mad chase of dappled cows, this pitching, tossing, clangorous flight, grew more real, more ludicrous, more menacing. 

Suddenly the path grew smoother; even, it seemed to Antony, more slippery. The wheels took a different motion, the noise of 68 machinery grew by tiny degrees less and lower and died into a drone. It almost seemed that they were gliding with the force of gravity alone, for the track (now a broad muddy band) dipped slightly but steadily. They appeared to be bound for a providential gap in an ugly stone wall; below this stretched a wonderfully green field bounded by a thick row of feathery sage-coloured trees, the first full foliage they had seen. 

68

Drugged with the steady head-wind of their 

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