which now at last I quitted him.

VIII

I'm afraid I can't quite say what, after that, I at first did, nor just
how I immediately profited by our separation. I felt absurdly excited,
though this indeed was what I had felt all day; there had been in fact
deepening degrees of it ever since my first mystic throb after finding
myself, the day before in our railway-carriage, shut up to an hour's
contemplation and collation, as it were, of Gilbert Long and Mrs.
Brissenden. I have noted how my first full contact with the changed
state of these associates had caused the knell of the tranquil mind
audibly to ring for me. I have spoken of my sharpened perception that
something altogether out of the common had happened, independently, to
each, and I could now certainly flatter myself that I hadn't missed a
feature of the road I had thus been beguiled to travel. It was a road
that had carried me far, and verily at this hour I _felt_ far. I daresay
that for a while after leaving poor Briss, after what I may indeed call
launching him, this was what I predominantly felt. To be where I was, to
whatever else it might lead, treated me by its help to the taste of
success. It appeared then that the more things I fitted together the
larger sense, every way, they made--a remark in which I found an
extraordinary elation. It justified my indiscreet curiosity; it crowned
my underhand process with beauty. The beauty perhaps was only for
_me_--the beauty of having been right; it made at all events an element
in which, while the long day softly dropped, I wandered and drifted and
securely floated. This element bore me bravely up, and my private
triumph struck me as all one with the charm of the moment and of the
place.

There was a general shade in all the lower reaches--a fine clear dusk in
garden and grove, a thin suffusion of twilight out of which the greater
things, the high tree-tops and pinnacles, the long crests of motionless
wood and chimnied roof, rose into golden air. The last calls of birds
sounded extraordinarily loud; they were like the timed, serious
splashes, in wide, still water, of divers not expecting to rise again. I
scarce know what odd consciousness I had of roaming at close of day in
the grounds of some castle of enchantment. I had positively encountered
nothing to compare with this since the days of fairy-tales and of the
childish imagination of the impossible. _Then_ I used to circle round
enchanted castles, for