It was a blowy day in early spring. Round white masses of cloud moved
lightly across a deep blue sky, and the trees, still thin and naked,
bent their heads and shook their branches, as if to elude the gambols
of a boisterous playfellow. The sun shone vividly, with restored
power, and though the clouds sometimes passed over his very face, the
shadows only lasted for a moment, and each returning radiance seemed
brighter than the one before. In the pure breath of the wind, as it
gustily swept the earth, was a promise of things vernal, of the tender
beauties of a coming spring; but there was still a keen, delightful
freshness in the air, a vague reminder of frosty starlights and serene
white snow--the untrodden snow of deserted, moon-lit streets--that
quickened the blood, and sent a craving for movement through the
veins. The people who trod the broad, clean roads and the paths of the
wood walked with a spring in their steps; voices were light and high,
and each breath that was drawn increased the sense of buoyancy, of
undiluted satisfaction. With these bursts of golden sunshine, so other
than the pallid gleamings of the winter, came a fresh impulse to life;
and the most insensible was dimly conscious how much had to be made up
for, how much lived into such a day.

Maurice Guest walked among the mossgreen tree-trunks, each of which
vied with the other in the brilliancy of its coating. He was under the
sway of a twofold intoxication: great music and a day rich in promise.
From the flood of melody that had broken over him, the frenzied storms
of applause, he had come out, not into a lamplit darkness that would
have crushed his elation back upon him and hemmed it in, but into the
spacious lightness of a fair blue day, where all that he felt could
expand, as a flower does in the sun.

His walk brought him to a broad stream, which flashed through the wood