he laughed with friendly amusement.  Cropping stags lifted their antlered heads, and fawns with dappled sides and immense lustrous eyes gazed at him without actual fear, even while they sidled closer to their mothers.  A skylark springing suddenly from the grass a few yards from his feet made him stop short once and stand looking upward and listening.  Who could pass by a skylark at five o’clock on a summer’s morning—­the little, heavenly light-heart circling and wheeling, showering down diamonds, showering down pearls, from its tiny pulsating, trilling throat?

“Do you know why they sing like that?  It is because all but the joy of things has been kept hidden from them.  They knew nothing but life and flight and mating, and the gold of the sun.  So they sing.”  That she had once said.

He listened until the jewelled rain seemed to have fallen into his soul.  Then he went on his way smiling as he knew he had never smiled in his life before.  He knew it because he realised that he had never before felt the same vigorous, light normality of spirit, the same sense of being as other men.  It was as though something had swept a great clear space about him, and having room for air he breathed deep and was glad of the commonest gifts of being.

The bathing pool had been the greatest pleasure of his uncared-for boyhood.  No one knew which long passed away Mount Dunstan had made it.  The oldest villager had told him that it had “allus ben there,” even in his father’s time.  Since he himself had known it he had seen that it was kept at its best.

Its dark blue depths reflected in their pellucid clearness the water plants growing at its edge and the enclosing shrubs and trees.  The turf bordering it was velvet-thick and green, and a few flag-steps led down to the water.  Birds came there to drink and bathe and preen and dress their feathers.  He knew there were often nests in the bushes—­sometimes the nests of nightingales who filled the soft darkness or moonlight of early June with the wonderfulness of nesting song.  Sometimes a straying fawn poked in a tender nose, and after drinking delicately stole away, as if it knew itself a trespasser.

To undress and plunge headlong into the dark sapphire water was a rapturous thing.  He swam swiftly and slowly by turns, he floated, looking upward at heaven’s blue, listening to birds’ song and inhaling all the fragrance of the early day.  Strength grew in him and life pulsed as the water lapped his limbs.  He found himself thinking with pleasure of a long walk he intended to take to see a farmer he must talk to about his hop gardens; he found himself thinking with pleasure of other things as simple and common to everyday life—­such things as he ordinarily faced merely because he must, since he could not afford an experienced bailiff.  He was his own bailiff, his own steward, merely, he had often thought, an unsuccessful farmer of half-starved lands.  But this morning neither he nor they seemed so starved, and—­for no reason—­there was a future of some sort.