out, shaking off Georgie’s protests, and struck up the valley leading from the sea.  The old mood was on him that had recurred again and again through life—­the mood when nothing would satisfy but to go out alone and walk and walk and breathe in peace from earth and air.  He went on, not walking fast, for the depression that was on him was not like a definite grief that urges the body to fierce exertion, and as he went it was as though he had neglected the charm too long and it was going to fail him.  A blight seemed to hang upon everything, and a dread that had no form but that pressed on him grew as he went.

He came at last to the marshy bottom of the valley, where the wet and tussocky grass was set in a tangle of blackberry bushes and bracken higher than a man.  A few forlorn tufts of cotton-grass still blew out in the languid breeze and the yellow stars of the cinquefoil shone from the moss, but disfigured by the dozens of evil-looking black slugs, three or four inches long, that lay motionless all over the marsh.  A faint, subtle smell hung on the air, the fragrance of the dodder, that covered the gorse bushes with a fine vermilion net, studded with pale pink flowers like fat flesh-coloured flies caught in a vast red spider’s web.  The whole place seemed redolent of evil—­the motionless glossy slugs, the deadly parasite with its curiously obscene flowers, the littered undergrowth rotting in the water, all these filled Ishmael with a suffocating sense of doom.  He stayed at gaze, yet longing to get away from this steamy place, where the gorse had gone grey beneath the false embraces of the dodder.

At last he turned and climbed slowly up the valley side; when he reached the top he had to pause and lean upon a gate to get his breath.  His heart was pounding in his ears.  He did not look up; for a few minutes the world was dark and filled with a great roaring.  Then he felt his breath coming more easily and the giddiness passed; he opened his eyes and straightened himself.

He opened them on to the wide stretch of sky that arched over the sea, and there he saw, stretched from headland to headland, one gleaming foot springing from an irradiated field, the other dying into a swirl of misty foam, a perfect arch of rainbow.  It was so triumphant, so brilliant, so unexpected, that at first he stood staring, his mouth open, his whistling breath coming unheeded.

A rainbow alone in Nature always looks an alien thing—­it is never part of a landscape, but the added touch which means wonder.  Like snow, it is always a phenomenon.  It has never lost the quality of miracle.

Far below the glowing span lay Cloom, wet grey roofs gleaming, and a dazzle of sun upon its whitewash; around the fields lay like a jewelled canopy, lighter than the sky, which still wore a deep purple-grey, against which the arch burned like fire.

As Ishmael looked the tears swam in his eyes, making the whole radiant vision reel and run together in a blaze of passionate light and colour.