stirrup. So complete was the darkness, however, and so small and
confined the circle of light cast by the tossing light, that, for all
they saw, they might have been riding round and round in a garden. Now
trees showed grim and towering for an instant, then gone again; now
their eyes were upon the track, the pools, the rugged ground, the soaked
meadow-grass; half a dozen times the river glimmered on their right,
turbid and forbidding. Once there shone in the circle of light the eyes
of some beast--pig or stag; seen and vanished again.

But the return journey was another matter; for they needed no lanterns,
and the dawn rose steadily overhead, showing all that they passed in
ghostly fashion, up to final solidity.

It resembled, in fact, the dawn of Faith in a soul.

First from the darkness outlines only emerged, vast and sinister, of
such an appearance that it was impossible to tell their proportions or
distances. The skyline a mile away, beyond the Derwent, might have been
the edge of a bank a couple of yards off; the glimmering pool on the
lower meadow path might be the lighted window of a house across the
valley. There succeeded to outlines a kind of shaded tint, all worked in
gray like a print, clear enough to distinguish tree from boulder and sky
from water, yet not clear enough to show the texture of anything. The
third stage was that in which colours began to appear, yet flat and
dismal, holding, it seemed, no light, yet reflecting it; and all in an
extraordinary cold clearness. Nature seemed herself, yet struck to
dumbness. No breeze stirred the twigs overhead or the undergrowth
through which they rode. Once, as the two, riding a little apart, turned
suddenly together, up a ravine into thicker woods, they came upon a herd
of deer, who stared on them without any movement that the eye could see.