reaths filling all the air and he had thought
them. A terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and
he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused
obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had
forgotten and deserted his home and his duties. When he traveled
about, darkness so brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong
done to other people because it was as if he poisoned the air about him
with gloom. Most strangers thought he must be either half mad or a man
with some hidden crime on his soul. He, was a tall man with a drawn
face and crooked shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel
registers was, "Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire,
England."

He had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his
study and told her she might have her "bit of earth." He had been in
the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere
more than a few days. He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots.
He had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and
had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them
with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.

But the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he
realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had
happened. He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he
had been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted, any
man's soul out of shadow. He had walked a long way and it had not
lifted his. But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down
to rest on a carpet of moss by a stream. It was a clear little stream
which ran quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious
damp greenness. Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low
laughter as it bubbled over and round stones. He saw birds come and
dip their heads to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away.
It seemed like a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness
seem deeper. The valley was very, very still.

As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven
gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the
valley itself. He wondered if he were going to sleep, but he was not.
He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things
growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots
grow