Quick flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, hints of mysteries, secrets of life passed trembling through his brain, unknown desires stung him.  As he gazed across the turf and into the thicket, the sunshine seemed really to become green, and the contrast between the bright glow poured on the lawn and the black shadow of the brake made an odd flickering light, in which all the grotesque postures of stem and root began to stir; the wood was alive.  The turf beneath him heaved and sank as with the deep swell of the sea.  He fell asleep, and lay still on the grass, in the midst of the thicket.

He found out afterwards that he must have slept for nearly an hour.  The shadows had changed when he awoke; his senses came to him with a sudden shock, and he sat up and stared at his bare limbs in stupid amazement.  He huddled on his clothes and laced his boots, wondering what folly had beset him.  Then, while he stood indecisive, hesitating, his brain a whirl of puzzled thought, his body trembling, his hands shaking; as with electric heat, sudden remembrance possessed him.  A flaming blush shone red on his cheeks, and glowed and thrilled through his limbs.  As he awoke, a brief and slight breeze had stirred in a nook of the matted boughs, and there was a glinting that might have been the flash of sudden sunlight across shadow, and the branches rustled and murmured for a moment, perhaps at the wind’s passage.

He stretched out his hands, and cried to his visitant to return; he entreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him.  And then panic fear rushed into his heart, and he ran blindly, dashing through the wood.  He climbed the vallum, and looked out, crouching, lest anybody should see him.  Only the shadows were changed, and a breath of cooler air mounted from the brook; the fields were still and peaceful, the black figures moved, far away, amidst the corn, and the faint echo of the high-pitched voices sang thin and distant on the evening wind.  Across the stream, in the cleft on the hill, opposite to the fort, the blue wood smoke stole up a spiral pillar from the chimney of old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage.  He began to run full tilt down the steep surge of the hill, and never stopped till he was over the gate and in the lane again.  As he looked back, down the valley to the south, and saw the violent ascent, the green swelling bulwarks, and the dark ring of oaks; the sunlight seemed to play about the fort with an aureole of flame.

“Where on earth have you been all this time, Lucian?” said his cousin when he got home.  “Why, you look quite ill.  It is really madness of you to go walking in such weather as this.  I wonder you haven’t got a sunstroke.  And the tea must be nearly cold.  I couldn’t keep your father waiting, you know.”