ay
Harmouth, at the red mouth of the valley where the river Hare trickles
into the sea through a barrier of shingle. Two gigantic and flaming
cliffs dwarf the little town to the proportions of a hamlet. In any
other situation Harmouth might have preserved its elegant Regency air,
but sprawling on the beach and scattered on the hillsides it has a
haphazard appearance, as if it had been dropped there when those two
huge arms of the upland stretched out and opened to the sea.

But Nature on the whole has been kind to Harmouth, though the first
thing that strikes the stranger in that place is her amazing and
apparently capricious versatility. Nature, round about Harmouth, is
never in the same mood for a mile together. The cliffs change their
form and colour with every dip in the way; now they are red like
blood, and now a soft and powdery pink with violet shadows in their
seams. Inland, it is a medley of fields and orchards, beech-woods,
pine-woods, dark moorland and sallow down, cut by the deep warm lanes
where hardly a leaf stirs on a windy day. It is not so much a
landscape as the fragments of many landscapes, samples in little of
the things that Nature does elsewhere on a grand scale. The effect on
a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a
beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing;
and a great longing seizes him for vast level spaces, for sameness,
for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest. Then one day he
climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity
he longed for. As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the
hills and the prone backs of the long ridges are all of one height;
the combes and valleys are mere rifts and dents in a great moor that
has no boundary but the sky. The country has revealed its august,
eternal soul. He is no longer distracted by its many moods; he loves
it the more for them, as a man loves the mutable ways of the woman
whose soul he knows.

Rickman stood upon a vantage ground, looking over the valley and the
bay. To him it was as if the soul of this land, like the soul of Lucia
Harden, had put on a veil. The hillside beneath him dropped steeply to
the valley and the town. Down there, alone and apart from Harmouth,
divided from the last white Regency villa by half a mile of
meadow-land, stood Court House; and as he looked at it he became more
acutely conscious of his misery. He sat down among the furze