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and its walls, and now she hated it, especially its thick walls.
Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this wind.
When she got home Clifford asked her:
’Where did you go?’
’Right across the wood! Look, aren’t the little daffodils
adorable? To think they should come out of the earth!’
’Just as much out of air and sunshine,’ he said.
’But modelled in the earth,’ she retorted, with a prompt
contradiction, that surprised her a little.
The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She fol-
lowed the broad riding that swerved round and up through
the larches to a spring called John’s Well. It was cold on this
hillside, and not a flower in the darkness of larches. But the
icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny well-
bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and clear it
was! Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh
pebbles. She heard the faint tinkle of water, as the tiny over-
flow trickled over and downhill. Even above the hissing
boom of the larchwood, that spread its bristling, leafless,
wolfish darkness on the down-slope, she heard the tinkle as
of tiny water-bells.
This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well
must have been a drinking-place for hundreds of years.
Now no more. Its tiny cleared space was lush and cold and
dismal.
She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she
heard a faint tapping away on the right, and stood still to
listen. Was it hammering, or a woodpecker? It was surely
hammering.

1 Lady Chatterly’s Lover