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.

He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all.  His energies were expended in action.  He sat as a part of the ruins, and the moon turned his shadow Westward from the South.  Overhead, as she declined, long ripples of silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing toward her.  They were the van of a tempest.  He did not observe them or the leaves beginning to chatter.  When he again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a huge mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his mind to scale it.  He got no nearer to the base of it for all his vigorous outstepping.  The ground began to dip; he lost sight of the sky.  Then heavy, thunder-drops streak his cheek, the leaves were singing, the earth breathed, it was black before him, and behind.  All at once the thunder spoke.  The mountain he had marked was bursting over him.