And still, in a trance of feeling, she feasted her eyes on the quiet country scene.
The old house which Diana Mallory had just begun to inhabit stood upon an upland, but it was an upland so surrounded by hills to north and east and south that it seemed rather a close-girt valley, leaned over and sheltered by the downs. Pastures studded with trees sloped away from the house on all sides; the village was hidden from it by boundary woods; only the church tower emerged. From the deep oriel window where she sat Diana could see a projecting wing of the house itself, its mellowed red brick, its Jacobean windows and roof. She could see also a corner of the moat with its running stream, a moat much older than the building it encircled, and beneath her eyes lay a small formal garden planned in the days of John Evelyn--with its fountain and its sundial, and its beds in arabesque. The cold light of December lay upon it all; there was no special beauty in the landscape, and no magnificence in the house or its surroundings. But every detail of what she saw pleased the girl's taste, and satisfied her heart. All the while she was comparing it with other scenes and another landscape, amid which she had lived till now--a monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of hotels, and everywhere a chattering unlovely crowd.
"Thank goodness!--that's done with," she thought--only to fall into a sudden remorse. "Papa--papa!--if you were only here too!"
She pressed her hands to her eyes, which were moist with sudden tears. But the happiness in her heart overcame the pang, sharp and real as it was. Oh! how blessed to have done with the Riviera, and its hybrid empty life, for good and all!--how blessed even, to have done with the Alps and Italy!--how blessed, above all, to have come _home!_--home into the heart of this English land--warm mother-heart, into which she, stranger and orphan, might creep and be at rest.
The eloquence of her own thoughts possessed her. They flowed on in a warm, mute rhetoric, till suddenly the Comic Spirit was there, and patriotic rapture began to see itself. She, the wanderer, the exile, what did she know of England--or England of her? What did she know of this village even, this valley in which she had pitched her tent? She had taken an old house, because it had pleased her fancy, because it had Tudor gables, pretty panelling, and a sundial. But what natural link had she with it, or with these peasants and countrymen? She had no true roots here. What she had done was mere whim and caprice. She was an alien, like anybody else--like the new men and prowling millionaires, who bought old English properties, moved thereto by a feeling which was none the less snobbish because it was also sentimental.