ng, and the restless perturbation that had tormented him
receding, fading. These green and gracious trees, bathed in a lucent
light, this sweet sea-wind, and the voice of the waters, a voice
monotonously soothing, helped him to find himself,--and to find
himself newer, fresher, a more vital personality. This newer Peter
Champneys was not going to be, perhaps, so easy-going a chap. He was
more insistent, he was sterner; to the art-conscience, in itself a
troublesome possession, he was adding the race-conscience, which
questions, demands, and will have nothing short of the truth. He had
been forced to see things as they are, things stripped of pleasant
trappings and made brutally bare; and his conscience and his
courage now arose to face facts. Any misery, rather than be slave to
shams! Any grief to bear, any price to pay, but let him possess his
own soul, let him have the truth!

He could not sit in judgment upon himself as an artist only; he had
to take himself seriously as a very wealthy man in an hour when very
wealthy men stood, so to speak, before the tribunal of the
conscience of mankind. He could not afford to be crushed by the
burden of much money. Neither could he ignore the stern question:
what was he going to do with the Champneys wealth? He wished that
that red-headed woman had taken half of it off his hands!

The Champneys money made him very thoughtful this morning, walking
with his hands behind his back, his head bare to the wind. The water
rippled in the sunlight. Out on the horizon a solitary sail
glimmered. The semicircle of village houses resembled the white
beads of a broken necklace, lying exactly where they'd fallen. He
turned a small headland, and the village vanished.

He had a pleasant sense of being alone with this rocky coast, with
its salty-sweet wind, its blue water, its limitless sky, from which
poured a flood of clear, pale golden sunlight. And then, as if out
of the heart of them all, came a figure immensely alive, the light
focusing upon her as if she were the true meaning of the picture in
which she appeared; as if this background were not accidental, but
had been chosen and arranged for her with delicate and deliberate
care.

He thought he had never seen any woman's body so superbly free in
its movement: she had the grace of a birch stirred by a spring wind.
The poise of her shoulders, the sweep of her garments blown by the
sea-breeze, the joyous and vigorous grace of her whole att