Be quick as you can, so's not to catch cold, an' I'll take a stroll up the bank an' give a call if anyone's comin'." She scrambled back to firm ground and set off for a saunter up stream, pausing here to reach for a nut, there to pluck a ripe blackberry, and again to examine a tangle of bryony, or the deep-red fruit of the honey-suckle; for almost all her waking life had been spent in towns among crowds, and these things were new and strange to her.

She met no one on her way until, where the stream twisted between a double fold of green pasture slopes, she came to the mill--a tall rickety building, with a tiled roof that time had darkened and greened with lichens, and a tall wheel turning slowly in a splash of water, and bright water dancing over a weir below.

In the doorway leaned a middle-aged man, powdered all over with white, even to the eyelids.

He caught sight of her, and she was afraid he would be angry, and warn her off for trespassing; but he nodded and called out something in a friendly manner--"Good day," perhaps.

She could not hear the words for the hum of the weir and the roaring of the machinery within the building.
It was time to retrace her steps, and she went back leisurably, peering for trout and plucking on the way a trail of the bryony, berried with orange and scarlet and yellow and palest green, to exhibit to Arthur Miles.