hillsides; emerald patches of moss jewelled the prevailing sobriety of the valley, a single curlew, with rising and falling crescendos of sound, flew here and there under needless anxiety, and far away on White Hill and the enormous breast of Cosdon glimmered grey stone ghosts from the past,—­track-lines and circles and pounds,—­the work of those children of the mist who laboured here when the world was younger, whose duty now lay under the new-born light of the budding heath.  White specks dotted the undulations where flocks roamed free; in the marsh, red cattle sought pasture, and now was heard the jingle-jangle of a sheep-bell, and now the cry of bellowing kine.

Like a dark incarnation of suffering over this expansive scene passed Clement Hicks to the meeting with John Grimbal.  His unrest was accentuated by the extreme sunlit peace of the Moor, and as he sat on Steeperton and gazed with dark eyes into the marshes below, there appeared in his face the battlefield of past struggles, the graves of past hopes.  A dead apathy of mind and muscle succeeded his mental exertion and passion of thought.  Increased age marked him, as though Time, thrusting all at once upon him bitter experiences usually spread over many years of a man’s life, had weighed him down, humped his back, thinned his hair, and furrowed his forehead under the load.  Within his eyes, behind the reflected blue of the sky, as he raised them to it, sat mad misery; and an almost tetanic movement of limb, which rendered it impossible for him to keep motionless even in his present recumbent position, denoted the unnatural excitation of his nerves.  The throb and spasm of the past still beat against his heart.  Like a circular storm in mid-ocean, he told himself that the tempest had not wholly ended, but might reawaken, overwhelm him, and sweep him back into the turmoil again.  As he thought, and his eye roved for a rider on a brown horse, the poor wretch was fighting still.  Yesterday fixed determination marked his movements, and his mind was made up; to-day, after a night not devoid of sleep, it seemed that everything that was best in him had awakened refreshed, and that each mile of the long tramp across Dartmoor had represented another battle fought with his fate.  Justice, Justice for himself and the woman he loved, was the cry raised more than once aloud in sharp agony on that great silence.  And only the drone of the shining-winged things and the dry rustle of the grasshoppers answered him.

Like the rest of the sore-smitten and wounded world, he screamed to the sky for Justice, and, like the rest of the world, forgot or did not know that Justice is only a part of Truth, and therefore as far beyond man’s reach as Truth itself.  Justice can only be conceived by humanity, and that man should even imagine any abstraction so glorious is wonderful, and to his credit.  But Justice lies not only beyond our power to mete to our fellows; it forms no part of the Creator’s methods with us or this particular