The Battle of Basinghall Street by E. Phillips Oppenheim

An early spring day came to London and, notwithstanding her unuttered, almost unacknowledged regrets, Julia was whirled away into the country in Sandbrook's somewhat exposed but exceedingly comfortable two-seater.

Following her directions--he was not permitted a map--they drove almost due southwards, far out of the region of soot and smoke, to where the tender green grasses lay like an emerald carpet upon the Downs, and the tang of the sea winds was soft and sweetened by the April sunshine. A turn to the right brought them into the country of fir plantations and woods of waxen-budded beeches, copses flushed with bluebells, primroses starring the sheltered ditches, and the most fragrant violets in the world peeping timidly out of the hawthorn-guarded hedgerows. In the by-way villages, stiff rows of crocuses lent splashes of colour to the cottage gardens, and more ambitious beds of hyacinths adorned the vicarage grounds. Everywhere was the twitter of birds, the rollicking puffs of pollen-carrying wind, from which the sting had departed, blue skies, the slow uplifting of winter's hand from the yearning land. They both of them decided that England was a very beautiful country.