III


It was a May evening, and Lydia Penfold, spinster, aged twenty-four, was
sketching in St. John's Vale, that winding valley which, diverging from
the Ambleside-Keswick road in an easterly direction, divides the northern
slopes of the Helvellyn range from the splendid mass of Blencathra.

So beautiful was the evening, so ravishing under its sway were heaven and
earth, that Lydia's work went but slowly. She was a professional artist,
to whom guineas were just as welcome as to other people; and she had very
industrious and methodical views of her business. But she was, before
everything, one of those persons who thrill under the appeal of beauty to
a degree that often threatens or suspends practical energy. Save for the
conscience in her, she could have lived from day to day just for the
moments of delight, the changes in light and shade, in colour and form,
that this beautiful world continually presents to senses as keen as hers.
Lydia's conscience, however, was strong; though on this particular
evening it did little or nothing to check the sheer sensuous dreaming
that had crept over her.

The hand that held her palette had dropped upon her knee, her eyes were
lifted to the spectacle before her, and her lips, slightly parted,
breathed in pleasure.

She looked on a pair of mountains of which one, torn and seamed from top
to toe as though some vast Fafnir of the prime had wreaked his dragon
rage upon it, fronted her sheer, rimmed with gold where some of its