‘Don’t mention it,’ he said, with redoubled urbanity.  ’It’s my way—­only my way!  When’ll you be off?’

‘Probably next week.  I’ll come and say good-bye.’

‘I must have a year!  But Phoebe will take it hard.’  John Fenwick had paused on his way home, and was leaning over a gate beside a stream, now thinking anxiously of his domestic affairs, and now steeped in waves of delight—­vague, sensuous, thrilling—­that flowed from the colours and forms around him.  He found himself in an intricate and lovely valley, through which lay his path to Langdale.  On either side of the stream, wooded or craggy fells, gashed with stone-quarries, accompanied the windings of the water, now leaving room for a scanty field or two, and now hemming in the river with close-piled rock and tree.  Before him rose a white Westmoreland farm, with its gabled porch and moss-grown roof, its traditional yews and sycamores; while to his left, and above the farm, hung a mountain-face, dark with rock, and purple under the evening shadows—­a rich and noble shape, lost above in dim heights of cloud, and, below, cleft to the heart by one deep ghyll, whence the golden trees—­in the glittering green of May—­descended single or in groups, from shelf to shelf, till their separate brilliance was lost in the dense wood which girdled the white farmhouse.

The pleasure of which he was conscious in the purple of the mountain, the colour of the trees, and all that magic of light and shade which filled the valley—­a pleasure involuntary, physical, automatic, depending on certain delicacies of nerve and brain—­rose and persisted, while yet his mind was full of harassing and disagreeable thoughts.

Well, Phoebe might take her choice!—­for they had come to the parting of the ways.  Either a good painter, a man on the level of the best, trained and equipped as they, or something altogether different—­foreman, a clerk, perhaps, in his uncle’s upholstery business at Darlington, a ticket-collector on the line—­anything!  He could always earn his own living and Phoebe’s.  There was no fear of that.  But if he was finally to be an artist, he would be a first-rate one.  Let him only get more training; give him time and opportunity; and he would be as good as any one.

Morrison, plainly, had thought him a conceited ass.  Well, let him!

What chance had he ever had of proving what was in him?  As he hung over the gate smoking, he thought of his father and mother, and of his childhood in the little Kendal shop—­the bookseller’s shop which had been the source and means of his truest education.

Not that he had been a neglected child.  Far from it.  He remembered his gentle mother, troubled by his incessant drawing, by his growing determination to be an artist, by the constant effort as he grew to boyhood to keep the peace between him and his irritable old father.  He remembered her death—­and those pictorial effects in the white-sheeted room—­effects of light and shadow—­of flowers—­of the grey head uplifted; he remembered also trying to realise them, stealthily, at night, in his own room, with chalk and paper—­and then his passion with himself, and the torn drawing, and the tears, which, as it were, another self saw and approved.