The effect on Miltoun might perhaps have been different had he not been so conscious of his intention to ask Audrey Noel to be his wife; but in any circumstances it is doubtful whether he would have done more than smile, and tear the paper up.  Truly that sort of thing had so little power to hurt or disturb him personally, that he was incapable of seeing how it could hurt or disturb others.  If those who read it were affected, so much the worse for them.  He had a real, if unobtrusive, contempt for groundlings, of whatever class; and it never entered his head to step an inch out of his course in deference to their vagaries.  Nor did it come home to him that Mrs. Noel, wrapped in the glamour which he cast about her, could possibly suffer from the meanness of vulgar minds.  Shropton’s note, indeed, caused him the more annoyance of those two documents.  It was like his brother-in-law to make much of little!

He hardly dozed at all during his swift journey through the sleeping country; nor when he reached his room at Monkland did he go to bed.  He had the wonderful, upborne feeling of man on the verge of achievement.  His spirit and senses were both on fire—­for that was the quality of this woman, she suffered no part of him to sleep, and he was glad of her exactions.

He drank some tea; went out, and took a path up to the moor.  It was not yet eight o’clock when he reached the top of the nearest tor.  And there, below him, around, and above, was a land and sky transcending even his exaltation.  It was like a symphony of great music; or the nobility of a stupendous mind laid bare; it was God up there, in His many moods.  Serenity was spread in the middle heavens, blue, illimitable, and along to the East, three huge clouds, like thoughts brooding over the destinies below, moved slowly toward the sea, so that great shadows filled the valleys.  And the land that lay under all the other sky was gleaming, and quivering with every colour, as it were, clothed with the divine smile.  The wind, from the North, whereon floated the white birds of the smaller clouds, had no voice, for it was above barriers, utterly free.  Before Miltoun, turning to this wind, lay the maze of the lower lands, the misty greens, rose pinks, and browns of the fields, and white and grey dots and strokes of cottages and church towers, fading into the blue veil of distance, confined by a far range of hills.  Behind him there was nothing but the restless surface of the moor, coloured purplish-brown.  On that untamed sea of graven wildness could be seen no ship of man, save one, on the far horizon—­the grim hulk, Dartmoor Prison.  There was no sound, no scent, and it seemed to Miltoun as if his spirit had left his body, and become part of the solemnity of God.  Yet, as he stood there, with his head bared, that strange smile which haunted him in moments of deep feeling, showed that he had not surrendered to the Universal, that his own spirit was but being