fir forest, and a soft gloom of oak woods, gray-brown and mottled as a
lizard's belly and back, closed the end of the valley eastward. On the
right the terraced gardens, with their ranges of glittering
conservatories, fell away to the sombre pond in the valley, home of
loudly-discoursing companies of ducks. The gentle hillside above was
clothed by plantations, and a grove of ancient beech trees, whose pale,
smooth boles stood out from among undergrowth of lustrous hollies and
the warm russet of fallen leaves. And over it all brooded the
restfulness of the Sabbath, and the gladness of a fair and equal light.

And the charm of the scene worked upon Richard, not with any heat of
excitement, but with a temperate and reasonable grace. For the spirit
of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure
tranquillity--a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than
hedonic, yet generous, spacious, nobly reasonable, giving ample scope
for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no
means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort.
Dickie had tried not a few desperate adventures, had conformed his
thought and action to not a few glaring patterns, rushing to violences
of extreme colour, extreme white and black. All that had proved
preeminently unsuccessful, a most poisonous harvest of Dead Sea fruit.
What, he began to ask himself, if he made an effort to conform it to
the pattern actually presented to him--mellow, sun-visited, with the
brave red of weather stained masonry in it, blue and silver of water
and sky, lustre of sturdy hollies, as well as the solemnity of leafless
woods, finger of frost in the hollows, and bleakness of snow?

And, as he sat meditating thus, breathing the clear air, feeling the
tempered, yet genial, sun-heat, many questions began to resolve
themselves. He seemed to look, as down a long, cloudy vista--beyond the
tumult and unruly clamour, the wayward resistance and defiant sinning,
the craven complainings, the ever-repeated suspicions and
misapprehensions of man--away into the patient, unalterable purposes of
God. And looking, for the moment, into those purposes, he saw this
also--namely, that sorrow, pain, and death, are sweet to whosoever
dares, instead of fighting with, or flying from them, to draw near, to
examine closely, to inquire humbly, into their nature and their
function. He began to perceive that these three reputed enemies--hated