the strip of highway passing through the canyon

As he looked at the strip of highway passing through the canyon of the forest he recalled with a shock that evening a month before, when at the end of a day of holiday he had watched the pageant of life on the road beneath him, and longed for an ampler share in it than fell to the lot of a poor clerk of St George’s. He had got his wish. He remembered his bitter jealousy in the hot Oxford streets of a sounding world in which he had no part. He was in the way during the next few months of getting a full portion of that world. And he realised that he did not want it, that the fruit was ashes before he put his mouth to it.
Peter tried to be honest with himself. One thing he had gained that could never be taken from him. He was not born of nameless peasants, but of the proudest stock in England. He had in his veins the blood of kings. That was the thought which he hugged to his breast to cheer his despondency.... But now he knew that he wanted that knowledge, and nothing more. He did not desire to live in palaces or lead armies. He wanted, with that certainty of his birth to warm his heart, to go back to his old bookish life, or to sink deep among countryfolk into the primordial country peace. He had thought himself ambitious, but he had been wrong. His early life had spoiled him for that bustling fever which takes men to high places. He did not like the dust of the arena, and he did not value the laurels.
The opposite slope of the hill towards Elsfield was golden in the afternoon sunlight, and mottled with the shadows of a few summer clouds. He saw the brackeny meadow, and above it the little coppice which hid the Painted Floor. He had a sudden longing to go there. It was his own sanctuary, hallowed with his innermost dreams. It represented a world of grace and simplicity ?ons removed from the turbid present.... But he did not dare. He must go through with the course to which he was predestined. He had got what he had hungered for, but he felt like a wild thing in a trap. Yet he was Buckingham’s son, and there could be no turning back.
A magpie flew down the hollow, but he had turned his head to the hill and did not notice it.
There was a hunt that day in Stowood. At dawn the slowhounds had been out to start the deer and the greyhounds had been unleashed before noon. They had begun by running a knobber in the Shabbington coverts, but in the afternoon the sport had been better, for they had found a stag of ten in the oak wood by Stanton and had hunted him through the jungle of the Wick and the Elsfield dingles, and killed in the hollow east of Beckley. As Peter made his way back to the verderer’s lodge he had heard the mort sounded a mile off.
He hastened, for he wished to be indoors before he was seen by any straggling hunter. Such had been Sir Ralph’s precise injunction; when the hunt was out he must bide indoors or in cover. But this time he was too late. He heard cries and laughter on all sides; a knot of hunt servants, whom they called Ragged Robins, crossed the road ahead of him at a canter. Worse, he saw two of the hunters coming towards him, whom he could not choose but pass. One was a woman on a black jennet, the other a young man on a great grey gelding. The first wore a riding dress all of white, with a velvet three-cornered cap, and a rich waistcoat of green velvet, the other had the common green habit of the woods, and was not to be distinguished from a yeoman save by the plume and the jewel in his flat cap.