Let him be, I say again.  He might have better Sunday thoughts; perhaps he will have some day.  At least he is a man, and a brave one; and as the greater contains the less, surely before a man can be a good man, he must be a brave one first, much more a man at all.  Cowards, old Odin held, inevitably went to the very bottom of Hela-pool, and by no possibility, unless of course they became brave at last, could rise out of that everlasting bog, but sank whining lower and lower, like mired cattle, to all eternity in the unfathomable peat-slime.  And if the twenty-first chapter of the Book of Revelation, and the eighth verse, is to be taken as it stands, their doom has not altered since Odin’s time, unless to become still worse.

Tom came up, over the home-close and through the barton-gate, through the farm-yard, and stopped at last at the porch.  The front door was open, and the door beyond it; and ere he knocked, he stopped, looking in silence at a picture which held him spellbound for a moment by its rich and yet quiet beauty.

Tom was no artist, and knew no more of painting, in spite of his old friendship with Claude, than was to be expected of a keen and observant naturalist who had seen half the globe.  Indeed, he had been in the habit of snubbing Claude’s profession; and of arriving, on pre-Raphaelite grounds, at a by no means pre-Raphaelite conclusion.  “A picture, you say, is worth nothing unless you copy Nature.  But you can’t copy her.  She is ten times more gorgeous than any man can dare represent her.  Ergo, every picture is a failure; and the nearest hedge-bush is worth all your galleries together”—­a syllogism of sharp edge, which he would back up by Byron’s—­

  “I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real,
  Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal.”

But here was one of Nature’s own pictures, drawn and coloured by more than mortal hand, and framed over and above, ready to his eye, by the square of the dark doorway, beyond which all was flooded with the full glory, of the low north-western sun.

A dark oak-ribbed ceiling; walls of pale fawn-yellow; an open window, showing a corner of rich olive-stone wall, enamelled with golden lichens, orange and green combs of polypody, pink and grey tufts of pellitory, all glowing in the sunlight.

Above the window-sill rose a bush of maiden-blush roses; a tall spire of blue monkshood; and one head of scarlet lychnis, like a spark of fire; and behind all, the dark blue sea, which faded into the pale-blue sky.

At the window stood a sofa of old maroon leather, its dark hue throwing out in strong relief two figures who sat upon it.  And when Tom had once looked at them, he looked at nothing else.