in as he could put it, he--he--had been offered a bribe
to advertise Poppy Grace for the benefit of Dicky, who kept her. To
advertise a little painted--he disposed of poor Poppy in a powerful
word which would have given her propriety a fit if it could have heard
him. That he himself should ever have been infatuated with Poppy
seemed to him now incredible, monstrous. In the last three weeks he
had not only grown sober, but mature. That youth of his which once
seemed immortal, had then ceased to be a part of him. He had cut
himself loose from it and put it behind him with all its miseries and
tumults and pollutions. But he couldn't get rid of it. Like an unclean
spirit cast out of him it seemed to have entered into Dicky as into a
convenient herd of swine. And in Dicky's detestable person it rose up
against him and pursued him. For Dicky, though sensual as any swine,
was cautious. Dicky, even with an unclean spirit in him, was not in
the least likely to rush violently down any steep place into the sea
and so perish out of his life.

That Dicky should have appeared on his last night here seemed the
vilest stroke that fate had dealt him yet. But Dicky could not follow
him up Harcombe Hill.

He looked before him. The lights of Harmouth opened out a thin line to
the esplanade, dividing the sea from the land by fire instead of foam;
strewn in the bed of the valley they revealed, as through some pure
and liquid medium, its darkness and its depth. Above them the great
flank of Muttersmoor stretched like the rampart of the night. Night
itself was twilight against that black and tragic line.

And Rickman, standing bareheaded on the hillside, was lifted up out of
his immense misery and unrest. He remembered how this land that he
loved so passionately had once refused him the inspiration that he
sought. And now it seemed to him that it could refuse him nothing,
that Nature under cover of the darkness gave up her inmost ultimate
secret. And if it be true that Nature's innermost ultimate secret is
known only to the pure, it was a sign of his own cleansing, this sense
of comfort and reconciliation, of unspoiled communion, of profound
immeasurable peace. In that moment his genius seemed to have passed
behind veils upon veils of separation, to possess that tender and
tragic beauty, to become one with the soul of the divine illimitable
night.

He was not in the least deceived as to the true source of his
inspiration. In all this, if