Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied into the air, and walked on and on.  “A father!” he kept repeating to himself:  “a child!” And though he knew it not, he was striking the keynotes of Nature.  But he did know of a singular harmony that suddenly burst over his whole being.

The moon was surpassingly bright:  the summer air heavy and still.  He left the high road and pierced into the forest.  His walk was rapid:  the leaves on the trees brushed his cheeks; the dead leaves heaped in the dells noised to his feet.  Something of a religious joy—­a strange sacred pleasure—­was in him.  By degrees it wore; he remembered himself:  and now he was possessed by a proportionate anguish.  A father! he dared never see his child.  And he had no longer his phantasies to fall upon.  He was utterly bare to his sin.  In his troubled mind it seemed to him that Clare looked down on him—­Clare who saw him as he was; and that to her eyes it would be infamy for him to go and print his kiss upon his child.  Then came stern efforts to command his misery and make the nerves of his face iron.

By the log of an ancient tree half buried in dead leaves of past summers, beside a brook, he halted as one who had reached his journey’s end.  There he discovered he had a companion in Lady Judith’s little dog.  He gave the friendly animal a pat of recognition, and both were silent in the forest-silence.

It was impossible for Richard to return; his heart was surcharged.  He must advance, and on he footed, the little dog following.

An oppressive slumber hung about the forest-branches.  In the dells and on the heights was the same dead heat.  Here where the brook tinkled it was no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the spirit of water.  Yonder in a space of moonlight on lush grass, the beams were as white fire to sight and feeling.  No haze spread around.  The valleys were clear, defined to the shadows of their verges, the distances sharply distinct, and with the colours of day but slightly softened.  Richard beheld a roe moving across a slope of sward far out of rifle-mark.  The breathless silence was significant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue heaven.  Tongue out of mouth trotted the little dog after him; crouched panting when he stopped an instant; rose weariedly when he started afresh.  Now and then a large white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest.

On a barren corner of the wooded highland looking inland stood grey topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass-blades.  Richard mechanically sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and listened to the panting of the dog.  Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights:  hundreds of glow-worms studded the dark dry ground.