Nelly Sarratt stood lost in the beauty of the spectacle commanded by Sir William Farrell’s cottage.  It was placed in a by-road on the western side of Loughrigg, that smallest of real mountains, beloved of poets and wanderers.  The ground dropped sharply below it to a small lake or tarn, its green banks fringed with wood, while on the further side the purple crag and noble head of Wetherlam rose out of sunlit mist,—­thereby indefinitely heightened—­into a pearl and azure sky.  To the north also, a splendid wilderness of fells, near and far; with the Pikes and Bowfell leading the host.  White mists—­radiant mists—­perpetually changing, made a magic interweaving of fell with fell, of mountain with sky.  Every tint of blue and purple, of amethyst and sapphire lay melted in the chalice carved out by the lake and its guardian mountains.  Every line of that chalice was harmonious as though each mountain and valley filled its place consciously, in a living order; and in the grandeur of the whole there was no terror, no hint of a world hostile and inaccessible to man, as in the Alps and the Rockies.

‘These mountains are one’s friends,’ said Farrell, smiling as he stood beside Nelly, pointing out the various peaks by name.  ’If you know them only a little, you can trust yourself to them, at any hour of the day or night.  Whereas, in the Alps, I always feel myself “a worm and no man"!’

‘I have never been abroad,’ said Nelly shyly.

For once he found an ingenue attractive.

’Then you have it to come—­when the world is sane again.  But some things you will have missed for ever.  For instance, you will never see Rheims—­as it was.  I have spent months at Rheims in old days, drawing and photographing.  I must show you my things.  They have a tragic value now.’

And taking out a portfolio from a rack near him, he opened it and put it on a stand before her.

Nelly, who had in her the real instincts of the artist, turned over some very masterly drawings, in mingled delight and despair.

‘If I could only do something like that!’ she said, pointing to a study of some of the famous windows at Rheims, with vague forms of saint and king emerging from a conflagration of colour, kindled by the afternoon sun, and dyeing the pavement below.

’Ah, that took me some time.  It was difficult.  But here are some fragments you’ll like—­just bits from the facade and the monuments.’

The strength of the handling excited her.  She looked at them in silence; remembering with disgust all the pretty sentimental work she had been used to copy.  She began to envisage what this commonly practised art may be; what a master can do with it.  Standards leaped up.  Alp on Alp appeared.  When George was gone she would work, yes, she would work hard—­to surprise him when he came back.

Sir William meanwhile was increasingly taken with his guest.  She was shy, very diffident, very young; but in the few things she said, he discerned—­or fancied—­the stirrings of a real taste—­real intelligence.  And she was prettier and more fetching than ever—­with her small dark head, and her lovely mouth.  He would like to draw the free sensuous line of it, the beautiful moulding of the chin.  What a prize for the young man!  Was he aware of his own good fortune?  Was he adequate?