"Hated it! Hated it! I went there lured by a belief that a man like
myself, with muscle and will, even without experience, could make a
fortune out of small capital on a sheep ranch. Wind and weather and
disease played the devil with me. I lost the little I had and came back
to begin over again--on nothing--here!" And he waved his hand over the
park with its sward and coppice and bracken and the deer cropping in the
late afternoon gold.
"To begin what again?" said Betty. It was an extraordinary enough thing,
seen in the light of conventions, that they should stand and talk like
this. But the spark had kindled between eye and eye, and because of it
they suddenly had forgotten that they were strangers.
"You are an American, so it may not seem as mad to you as it would to
others. To begin to build up again, in one man's life, what has taken
centuries to grow--and fall into this."
"It would be a splendid thing to do," she said slowly, and as she said
it her eyes took on their colour of bluebells, because what she had seen
had moved her. She had not looked at him, but at the cropping deer as
she spoke, but at her next sentence she turned to him again.
"Where should you begin?" she asked, and in saying it thought of
Stornham.
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