Chapter 7

Jim thoughtfully retraced his steps. He was a village character, and
he had a villager's simplicity: that is, the simplicity which comes
from the lack of a complicated experience. But simple by nature he
certainly was not. Among the rank and file of rustics he was quite a
Talleyrand, or rather had been one, till he lost a good deal of his
self-command by falling in love.

Now, however, that the charming object of his distraction was out of
sight he could deliberate, and measure, and weigh things with some
approach to keenness. The substance of his queries was, What change
had come over Margery--whence these new notions?

Ponder as he would he could evolve no answer save one, which,
eminently unsatisfactory as it was, he felt it would be unreasonable
not to accept: that she was simply skittish and ambitious by nature,
and would not be hunted into matrimony till he had provided a well-
adorned home.

Jim retrod the miles to the kiln, and looked to the fires. The kiln
stood in a peculiar, interesting, even impressive spot. It was at
the end of a short ravine in a limestone formation, and all around
was an open hilly down. The nearest house was that of Jim's cousin
and partner, which stood on the outskirts of the down beside the
turnpike-road. From this house a little lane wound between the steep
escarpments of the ravine till it reached the kiln, which faced down
the miniature valley, commanding it as a fort might command a defile.

The idea of a fort in this association owed little to imagination.
For on the nibbled green steep above the kiln stood a bye-gone, worn-
out specimen of such an erection, huge, impressive, and difficult to
scale even now in its decay. It was a British castle or
entrenchment, with triple rings of defence, rising roll behind roll,
their outlines cutting sharply against the sky, and Jim's kiln nearly
undermining their base. When the lime-kiln flared up in the night,
which it often did, its fires lit up the front of these ramparts to a
great majesty. They were old friends of his, and while keeping up
the heat through the long darkness, as it was sometimes his duty to
do, he would imagine the dancing lights and shades about the
stupendous earthwork to be the forms of those giants who (he
supposed) had heaped it up. Often he clambered upon it, and walked
about the summit, thinking out the problems connected with his
business, his partner, his future, his Margery.

It was what he did this evening, continuing the meditation on the
young girl's manner that he had begun upon the road, and still, as
then, finding no clue to the change.

While thus engaged he observed a man coming up the ravine to the
kiln. Business messages were almost invariably left at the