“Miss Harden—­”

“Yes?”

She turned.  His heart beat violently.  He was afraid to look up lest his face should betray his emotion; it must seem so disproportioned to its cause.  And yet he was going to ask her for leave to put his drama, the fine offspring of his soul, into her hands.

“May I send you the drama I spoke of?  I would like you to see it.”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

He tried to stammer out some words of thanks; but they died before utterance.

“You know your way now, don’t you?” said she.

“Yes, thanks.”

Her hand was on the gate; he opened it to let her pass.  He also made a movement as though he would have held out his hand, but thought better of it, raising his hat instead.

He stood uncovered until she had passed.

He walked up and down the road, giving her time to get well out of sight.  Then he returned to the place where he had suffered, and stood a long while looking over the valley.

He knew now the meaning of his great misery; and it was misery no longer.  The veil was lifted from the face of Nature; and it was a face that he had never yet seen.  It had lost that look of mysterious, indefinable reproach.  It was as if the beauty of the land, seeking after the heart that should love it, was appeased and reconciled.  He could hear the lyric soul of things most clearly and unmistakably, and it was singing a new song.  A strange, double-burdened contradictory song.  There was sorrow in it, such sorrow as her children drink from the breast of the tragic earth; and through it all and over it the laughter as of some yet virgin and imperishable joy.

For Nature sings to every poet the song of his own soul.

He spent the last of that Easter Sunday in his shabby little bedroom in the Marine Hotel, where with windows open to the wind and sea he sat writing long past midnight.  And hope rose again in him as he surveyed the first rough draft—­that wild battlefield and slaughter-ground of lines, lines shooting and flying in all directions, lines broken and scattered and routed by other lines, over-ridden and trampled down by word upon triumphing word.  Above the hideous confusion at least two verses shone luminous and clear; they had come swinging into the pure ether, full-formed and golden from their birth.  And over the whole he wrote in legible characters, “On Harcombe Hill.”

His doubt had died there; and on Easter Monday he awoke exulting in another blessed day.

CHAPTER XXII

Lucia had yielded recklessly to her pleasure-giving instinct, and was only half contented.  She had given pleasure to her father by writing him a long letter; she was in a fair way of giving pleasure to Horace Jewdwine by undertaking this monstrous labour of the catalogue; and she had given pleasure to herself in giving pleasure to them.  But there was one person to whom she had not given pleasure; and that person was Horace Jewdwine’s friend.  On the contrary, she had robbed the poor man of the one solitary pleasure he had anticipated in his three days’ holiday; with what disastrous results she had just witnessed.