So beautiful was the evening, so ravishing under its sway were heaven and earth, that Lydia’s work went but slowly.  She was a professional artist, to whom guineas were just as welcome as to other people; and she had very industrious and methodical views of her business.  But she was, before everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy.  Save for the conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form, that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers.  Lydia’s conscience, however, was strong; though on this particular evening it did little or nothing to check the sheer sensuous dreaming that had crept over her.

The hand that held her palette had dropped upon her knee, her eyes were lifted to the spectacle before her, and her lips, slightly parted, breathed in pleasure.

She looked on a pair of mountains of which one, torn and seamed from top to toe as though some vast Fafnir of the prime had wreaked his dragon rage upon it, fronted her sheer, rimmed with gold where some of its thrusting edges still caught the sunset, but otherwise steeped in purple shades already prophesying night; while the other, separated from the first by a gap, yet grouping with it, ran slanting away to the northwest, offering to the eyes only a series of lovely foreshortened planes, rising from the valley, one behind the other, sweeping upward and backward to the central peak of Skiddaw, and ablaze with light from base to summit.

The evenings in the north are long.  It was past seven on this May day; yet Lydia knew that the best of the show was still to come; she waited for the last act, and refused to think of supper.  That golden fusion of all the upper air; that “intermingling of Heaven’s pomp,” spread on the great slopes of Skiddaw—­red and bronze and purple, shot through each other, and glorified by excess of light; that sharpness of the larch green on the lower slopes; that richness of the river fields; that shining pageantry of cloud, rising or sinking with the mountain line:  pondering these things, absorbing them, she looked at her drawing from time to time in a smiling despair; the happy despair of the artist, who amid the failure of to-day looks forward with passion to the effort of to-morrow.

Youth and natural joy possessed her.

What scents from the river-bank, under the softly breathing wind which had sprung up with the sunset!  The girl brought her eyes down, and saw a bank of primroses, and beyond, in the little copse on the farther side of the stream, a gleam of blue, where the wild hyacinth spread among the birches.  While close to her, at her very feet, ran the stream, with its slipping, murmuring water, its stones splashed with white, purple, and orange, its still reaches paved with evening gold.