Outside the gate of Court House he stood and looked about him, uncertain of the way he would go.  All ways were open to him, and finally, avoiding the high road, he climbed up a steep and stony lane to the great eastern rampart which is Harcombe Hill.  Beneath him lay Harmouth, at the red mouth of the valley where the river Hare trickles into the sea through a barrier of shingle.  Two gigantic and flaming cliffs dwarf the little town to the proportions of a hamlet.  In any other situation Harmouth might have preserved its elegant Regency air, but sprawling on the beach and scattered on the hillsides it has a haphazard appearance, as if it had been dropped there when those two huge arms of the upland stretched out and opened to the sea.

But Nature on the whole has been kind to Harmouth, though the first thing that strikes the stranger in that place is her amazing and apparently capricious versatility.  Nature, round about Harmouth, is never in the same mood for a mile together.  The cliffs change their form and colour with every dip in the way; now they are red like blood, and now a soft and powdery pink with violet shadows in their seams.  Inland, it is a medley of fields and orchards, beech-woods, pine-woods, dark moorland and sallow down, cut by the deep warm lanes where hardly a leaf stirs on a windy day.  It is not so much a landscape as the fragments of many landscapes, samples in little of the things that Nature does elsewhere on a grand scale.  The effect on a stranger is at first alluring, captivating, like the caprices of a beautiful woman; then it becomes disconcerting, maddening, fatiguing; and a great longing seizes him for vast level spaces, for sameness, for the infinity where he may lose himself and rest.  Then one day he climbs to the top of Harcombe or Muttersmoor and finds the immensity he longed for.  As far as his sight can reach, the shoulders of the hills and the prone backs of the long ridges are all of one height; the combes and valleys are mere rifts and dents in a great moor that has no boundary but the sky.  The country has revealed its august, eternal soul.  He is no longer distracted by its many moods; he loves it the more for them, as a man loves the mutable ways of the woman whose soul he knows.

Rickman stood upon a vantage ground, looking over the valley and the bay.  To him it was as if the soul of this land, like the soul of Lucia Harden, had put on a veil.  The hillside beneath him dropped steeply to the valley and the town.  Down there, alone and apart from Harmouth, divided from the last white Regency villa by half a mile of meadow-land, stood Court House; and as he looked at it he became more acutely conscious of his misery.  He sat down among the furze and heather and bracken; he could think of nothing better than to sit there and stare into the face of Nature, not like a poet whom love makes lyrical, but like a quite ordinary person whom it makes dumb.  And Nature never turned to a poet