earest to the heart of God. He
found, indeed, very often, that even when prudence and reason afforded
excellent reasons for abstaining from action, to yield to intuition
turned out to be the wisest and the kindest course; until, in practical
matters, he learnt to trust it unhesitatingly, even if it led him, as
the light led the pilgrim, to stumble for a time in a field full of
dark mountains.

XXI

A Far-off Day--A Compact--Fragrant Memories

There was, as I have said, a strong visionary tendency in Hugh, which
had been to a certain extent restricted in the days of his professional
life; but now that he was free, it began to recur with extraordinary
frequency and force. It was when he was reading that this faculty
visited him, as a rule, and more especially when he read, as he was
accustomed to do, after he was awake in the morning, until the time
came for him to rise. The mind, struggling to free itself from the
dominion of sleep, had not yet put on the obedience of the day, but
seemed to act with a whimsical independence of its own. His thoughts
were then most apt to wear a melancholy tinge; a certain apprehensive
shadow often lay upon him, a sense of being unequal to the claims of
the day, a tendency to rehearse, without hopefulness or spring, the
part he would have to play, to exaggerate difficulties and obstacles.
Reading, as a rule, served to distract his thoughts; but it was hardly
an intellectual so much as a meditative process; the thoughts and words
of the writer, on such occasions, often seemed to him like beaters
going through a covert, trampling the fern and rapping the tree trunks,
starting from their lairs all kinds of hidden game.

One morning he was lying thus, reading quietly, when there suddenly
darted into his mind, for no particular reason, the thought of a summer
day he had spent as a small boy at his public school. It had been a
holiday; the day cloudless and bright, yet with a delicious coolness in
the air; and the sunshine fell, he remembered, on the great trees of
the place and the venerable buildings, gleaming through a golden haze,
which made it seem as though he viewed everything, not through empty
air, but through a tinted and tangible medium, as it were an aerial
honey, which lent a liquid sweetness to all outlines and surfaces. He
had wandered off with a friend, in that perfect afternoon, through the
meadows, for a long vague ramble, ending up with a bathe in the river.