wood. Meynell, who knew every yard of the great heath and loved it well,
felt himself lifted there in spirit as he looked. The "bunchberries" must
just be ripening on the high ground--nestling scarlet and white amid
their glossy leaves. And among them and beside them, the taller, slender
bilberries, golden green; the exquisite grasses of the heath, pale pink,
and silver, and purple, swaying in the winds, clothing acre after acre
with a beauty beyond the looms of men; the purple heather and the ling
flushing toward its bloom: and the free-limbed scattered birch trees,
strongly scrawled against the sky. The scurry of the clouds over the
purple sweeps of moor, the beat of the wind, and then suddenly, pools of
fragrant air sun-steeped--he drew in the thought of it all, as he might
have drunk the moorland breeze itself, with a thrill of pleasure, which
passed at once into a movement of soul.

"_My God--my God_!"

No other words imagined or needed. Only a leap of the heart, natural,
habitual, instinctive, from the imagined beauty of the heath, to the
"Eternal Fountain" of all beauty.

The hand of the dying man made a faint rustling with the sheet. Meynell,
checked, rebuked almost, by the slight sound, bent his eyes again on the
sleeper, and leaning forward tried to meditate and pray. But to-night he
found it hard. He realized anew his physical and mental fatigue, and a
certain confused clamour of thought, strangely persistent behind the more
external experience alike of body and mind; like the murmur of a distant
sea heard from far inland, as the bond and background of all lesser
sounds.

The phrases of the letter he had found on the hall-table recurred to him