station gates and he had seen the moorland unroll itself before his
eyes. There was a new pungency in the autumn air, an unaccustomed
scantiness in the herbiage of the moor and the low hedges growing from
the top of the stone walls. The glory of the heather had passed,
though here and there a clump of brilliant yellow gorse remained. The
telegraph posts, leaning away from the wind, seemed somehow scantier;
the road stretched between them, lonely and desolate. From a farmhouse
in the bosom of the tree-hung hills lights were already twinkling, and
when he reached the edge of the moor, and the sea spread itself out
almost at his feet, the shapes of the passing steamers, with their long
trail of smoke, were blurred and uncertain. Below, his home field, his
wall-enclosed patch of kitchen garden, the long, low house itself lay
like pieces from a child's play-box stretched out upon the carpet. Only
to-night there was no mist. They made their cautious way downwards
through the clearest of darkening atmospheres. On the hillsides, as
they dropped down, they could hear the music of an occasional sheep
bell. Rabbits scurried away from the headlights of the car, an early
owl flew hooting over their heads. Tallente, tired with his journey,
perhaps a little worn with the excitement of the last two months, found
something dark and a little lonely about the unoccupied house, something
a little dreary in his solitary dinner and the long evening spent with
no company save his books and his pipe. Later on, he lay for long
awake, watching the twin lights flash out across the Channel and
listening to the melancholy call of the owls as they swept back and
forth across the lawn to their secret abodes in the cliffs. When at
last he slept, however, he slept soundly. An unlooked-for gleam of
sunshine and the dull roar of the incoming tide breaking upon the beach
below woke him the next morning long after his usual hour. He bathed,
shaved in front of the open window, and breakfasted with an absolute
renewal of his fuller interest in life. It was not until he had sent