ted. "I haven't seen you go
beyond the fields for ages. Your mother'll be all right now."

Ishmael hesitated, then picked up a stick, and went out with the Parson.
Boase had wondered much how deeply Ishmael had been hurt by the
defection of Blanche, and it had been difficult for him to ascertain, as
the young man's reserve was not of the quality which all the time
tacitly asks for questioning. On the surface he had shown no trace,
except by a sudden ageing that was probably temporary; there had been,
as far as Boase knew, no outbreaks of rage or pain. Now he began to
suspect that it was taking a worse way--an utter benumbing of the
faculty of enjoyment. Never since Ishmael's earliest boyhood had beauty
failed to rouse him to emotion, and the Parson wondered whether it could
fail now. At least it was worth trying, and it was not without guile
that he had proposed this walk; he knew of something he meant to spring
upon Ishmael as a test. He led, as though casually, to a wild gorge that
lay on the way to the Vicarage, but nearer the sea than the
commonly-used path, which here looped inland to avoid it. A stream,
half-hidden by heavy growths of bracken and hemlock and furze, raced
down this gorge to the pebbly beach, where it divided up into a dozen
tiny streams that bubbled and trickled to the sea's edge. All down the
gorge great hummocks of earth had been thrown up at some giant upheaval
of the land's making, and over their turfy, furze-ridden slopes granite
boulders were tumbled one against the other. In the treacherous fissures
between brambles and bracken had grown thickly; over everything else
except the bare rocks the furze had spread in a dense sea that followed
the curves of the slopes and stretched on up over each side of the
gorge. Everything was grey--pearly grey of the sky, grey-green of the
turf, brown-grey of last year's undergrowth, cold grey of the
boulders--everything except the gorse; and it was this that had caused
the Parson to catch his breath and stand amazed when first he came upon
it as at too much of beauty for eyes to believe--that caught at him
again now though he was expecting it. He and Ishmael rounded the end of
the valley, mounted a slope, and stood with all the length and sweep of
the gorge rolling around them.

By some freak of soil or aspect every tuft of the low-lying cushion
gorse that covered the slopes and hummocks as far as the eye could see
was in full bloom, not a dry bush to be se