four o'clock
However , it was just the sort of day for lolling in the Hermitage , and he would go and finish Dr. Moore 's Zeluco there before dinner . The Hermitage stood in Fir-tree Grove -- the way Hetty was sure to come in walking from the Hall Farm . So nothing could be simpler and more natural : meeting Hetty was a mere circumstance of his walk , not its object . Arthur 's shadow flitted rather faster among the sturdy oaks of the Chase than might have been expected from the shadow of a tired man on a warm afternoon , and it was still scarcely four o'clock when he stood before the tall narrow gate leading into the delicious labyrinthine wood which skirted one side of the Chase , and which was called Fir-tree Grove , not because the firs were many , but because they were few . It was a wood of beeches and limes , with here and there a light silver-stemmed birch -- just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs : you see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs , or peeping from behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime ; you hear their soft liquid laughter -- but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye , they vanish behind the silvery beeches , they make you believe that their voice was only a running brooklet , perhaps they metamorphose themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost bough . It was not a grove with measured grass or rolled gravel for you to tread upon , but with narrow , hollow-shaped , earthy paths , edged with faint dashes of delicate moss -- paths which look as if they were made by the free will of the trees and underwood , moving reverently aside to look at the tall queen of the white-footed nymphs . It was along the broadest of these paths that Arthur Donnithorne passed , under an avenue of limes and beeches .