She has now--these," and he nodded at a window open
to the yellow west. Advena looked with him.

"Oh, if you have a creative imagination," she said "like Wallingham's.
But even then your vision must be only political economic, material. You
can't conceive the--flowers--that will come out of all that. And if you
could it wouldn't be like having them."

"And the scope of the individual, his chance of self-respect, unhampered
by the traditions of class, which either deaden it or irritate it in
England! His chance of significance and success! And the splendid,
buoyant, unused air to breathe, and the simplicity of life, and the
plenty of things!"

"I am to be consoled because apples are cheap."

"You are to be consoled for a hundred reasons. Doesn't it console you
to feel under your very feet the forces that are working to the immense
amelioration of a not altogether undeserving people?"

"No," said Advena, rebelliously; and indeed he had been a trifle
didactic to her grievance. They laughed together, and then with a look
at her in which observation seemed suddenly to awake, Finlay said--

"And those things aren't all, or nearly all. I sometimes think that the
human spirit, as it is set free in these wide unblemished spaces, may be
something more pure and sensitive, more sincerely curious about what is
good and beautiful--"

He broke off, still gazing at her, as if she had been an idea and no
more. How much more she was she showed him by a vivid and beautiful
blush.

"I am glad you are so well satisfied," she said, and then, as if her
words had carried beyond their intention, she blushed again.

Upon which Hugh Finlay saw his idea incarnate.

CHAPTER XV

If it were fair or adequate to so quote, I should be very much tempted
to draw the history of Lorne Murchison's sojourn in England from his
letters home. He put his whole heart into these, his discoveries and his
recognitions and his young enthusiasm, all his claimed inheritance, all
that he found to criticize and to love. His mother said, half-jealously
when she read them, that he seemed tremendously taken up with the old
country; and of course she expressed the thing exactly, as she always
did: he was tremendously taken up with it. The old country fell into the
lines of his imagination, from the towers of Westminster to the shops
in the Strand; from the Right Hon. Fawcett Wallingham, who laid great
issues before the public, to the man who sang melanchol