pril was coming on, but the ploughed land at their feet was still bare;
the earth waited. On that side of the valley she was delicately
unfruitful, spent with rearing the fine, thin beauty of the woods. But,
down below, the valley ran over with young grass and poured it to the
river in wave after wave, till the last surge of green rounded over the
water's edge. Rain had fallen in the night, and the river had risen; it
rested there, poised. It was wonderful how a thing so brimming, so
shining, so alive could be so still; still as marsh water, flat to the
flat land.

At that moment, in a flash that came like a shifting of her eyes, the
world she looked at suffered a change.

And yet it did not change. All the appearances of things, their colours,
the movement and the stillness remained as if constant in their rhythm
and their scale; but they were heightened, intensified; they were
carried to a pitch that would have been vehement, vibrant, but that the
stillness as well as the movement was intense. She was not dazzled by it
or confused in any way. Her senses were exalted, adjusted to the pitch.

She would have said now that the earth at her feet had become
insubstantial, but that she knew, in her flash, that what she saw was
the very substance of the visible world; live and subtle as flame; solid
as crystal and as clean. It was the same world, flat field for flat
field and hill for hill; but radiant, vibrant, and, as it were,
infinitely transparent.

Agatha in her moment saw that the whole world brimmed and shone and was
alive with the joy that was its life, joy that flowed flood-high and yet
was still. In every leaf, in every blade of grass, this life was
manifest as a strange, a divine translucence. She was about to point it
out to the man at her side when she remembered that he had eyes for the
beauty of the earth, but no sense of its secret and supernatural light.
Harding Powell denied, he always had denied the supernatural. And when
she turned to him her vision had passed from her.

They must have another tramp some day, he said. He wanted to see more
of this wonderful place. And then he spoke of his recovery.

"It's all very well," he said, "but I can't account for it. Milly says
it's the place."

"It _is_ a wonderful place," said Agatha.

"Not so wonderful as all that. You saw how I was the day after we came.
Well--it can't be the place altogether."

"I rather hope it isn't," Agatha said.

"Do you? What