ped in
waves of delight--vague, sensuous, thrilling--that flowed from the
colours and forms around him. He found himself in an intricate and
lovely valley, through which lay his path to Langdale. On either side
of the stream, wooded or craggy fells, gashed with stone-quarries,
accompanied the windings of the water, now leaving room for a scanty
field or two, and now hemming in the river with close-piled rock and
tree. Before him rose a white Westmoreland farm, with its gabled porch
and moss-grown roof, its traditional yews and sycamores; while to his
left, and above the farm, hung a mountain-face, dark with rock, and
purple under the evening shadows--a rich and noble shape, lost above
in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one
deep ghyll, whence the golden trees--in the glittering green of
May--descended single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their
separate brilliance was lost in the dense wood which girdled the white
farmhouse.

The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain,
the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which
filled the valley--a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic,
depending on certain delicacies of nerve and brain--rose and
persisted, while yet his mind was full of harassing and disagreeable
thoughts.

Well, Phoebe might take her choice!--for they had come to the parting
of the ways. Either a good painter, a man on the level of the
best, trained and equipped as they, or something altogether
different--foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle's upholstery
business at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line--anything! He
could always earn his own living and Phoebe's. There was no fear of
that. But if he was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate
one. Let him only get more training; give him time and opportunity;
and he would be as good as any one.

Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited ass. Well, let him!

What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him? As he hung
over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his
childhood in the little Kendal shop--the bookseller's shop which had
been the source and means of his truest education.

Not that he had been a neglected child. Far from it. He remembered
his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing
determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to
boyhood to keep the peace between him and