two men. One could be nothing to her; the other she had promised to marry; and even in the midst of her critical analysis she blamed herself, not without reason, in that her love for Christopher had no power to blind her. She asked herself bitterly what an affection was worth that could thus dwell in cold blood upon a lover's weaknesses. She answered herself that it was Christopher's own fault. She felt glad that he was what he was. His defects looked lovable; and only in the rather chilly daylight thrown by Stapledon's characteristics did Christo's blemishes appear at all. Then Honor grew very angry with herself, but tried to believe that her anger was directed against Myles. She flew upon him savagely to tear him to pieces; she strove furiously, pitilessly to strip him to his soul; but she was just between the ebullitions of anger, and, after her hurricane onset, the lacerated figure of her cousin still stood a man. He was difficult to belittle or disparage by the nature of him. One may trample a flower-bed into unlovely ruin in a moment; to rob a lichen-clad rock of its particular beauty is a harder and a lengthier task. Granted that the man was ponderous and lacking in laughter, he could yet be kind and gentle to all; granted that he appeared oppressed with the necessity of setting a good example to the world, yet he was in earnest, of self-denying and simple habit, one who apparently practised nothing he did not preach. She turned impatiently away from the picture of such admirable qualities; she told herself that he was little better than a savage in some aspects, a prig in all the rest. Yet Honor Endicott had lived too close to Nature to make the mistake of any lengthened self-deception. Myles was living a life that would wear, as against an existence which even her green experience of the world whispered was irrational; and though the shrewdness of Stapledon appeared a drab and unlovely compound beside Christopher's sparkling philosophy, yet Honor knew which stood for the juster views of life and conduct. One represented a grey twilight, clear and calm if wholly lacking any splendid height of hue; the other promised wide contrasts, tropical sunshine, and probable tempests. Not a little in the sobriety of the first picture attracted her; but she was none the less well pleased to think that she had already decided for the second. Herein she followed instinct, for her nature was of the sort that needed variable weather if intellectual health was to be her portion.
Yet these dissimilar men, as chance willed it, proved excellent friends, and, from the incident of their first meeting, grew into a sufficiently warm comradeship. Myles found himself gasping a dozen times a day before the audacities of Christopher. Sometimes indeed he suspected Yeoland's jewels of being paste; sometimes he marvelled how a professed Christian could propound certain theories; sometimes also he suspected that the Squire of Godleigh spoke truer than he knew. Christopher, for his part, welcomed the farmer, as he had welcomed any man whose destiny it was to lighten Honor's anxiety. That the new-comer was putting a couple of thousand pounds into Endicott's proved passport sufficient to Yeoland's esteem. Moreover, he liked Myles for other reasons. They met often in the fields and high places at dawn, and from standpoints widely different they both approached Nature with love. Christopher took a telescopic survey, delighted in wide harmonies, great shadows, upheavals of cloud, storms, sunsets, rivers overflowing and the magic of the mist. He knew the name of nothing and shrank from scientific approach to natural objects—to bird or bud or berry; but he affected all the wild animate and inanimate life of his woods and rivers; he was reluctant to interfere with anything; he hated the mournful echo of a woodman's axe in spring, though each dull reverberation promised a guinea for his empty purse. Stapledon, on the contrary, while not dead to spacious manifestations of force, was also microscopic. He missed much that the other was quick to glean, but gained an intimate knowledge of matters radical, and, being introspective, dug deeper lessons out of Devon hedgerows and the economy of Dartmoor bogs than Yeoland gathered from the procession of all the seasons as displayed in pomp and glory under the banner of the sun.
On a day when as yet no shadow had risen between them; when as yet Myles contemplated his cousin's engagement without uneasiness, and Christopher enjoyed the other's ingenuous commentary upon Honor's rare beauty of mind and body, they walked together at sunset on the high lands of Godleigh. Above the pine trees that encircled Yeoland's home and rose behind it, an offshoot from the Moor extended. Deep slopes of fern and grass, mountain ash and blackthorn, draped the sides of this elevation, and upon the crown of a little hill, sharing the same with wild ridges and boulders of stone, spread ruins and lay foundations of a building that had almost vanished. A single turret still stood, ceiled with the sky, carpeted with grass; and all round about a glory of purple heather fledged the granite, the evening scent of the bracken rose, flames of sunset fire touched stones and tree-tops, and burnt into the huge side of distant Cosdon Beacon, until that mountain was turned into a mist of gold.
"There would be a grand sky if we were on the Moor to-night," said Christopher; "not one of the clear, cloudless sort—as clean and uneventful as a saint's record—but what I call a human sunset—full of smudged splendour and gorgeous blots and tottering ruins, with live fire streaming out of the black abysses and an awful scarlet pall flung out to cover the great red-hot heart of the sun as he dips and dips."
"A sunset always means to-morrow to me."
"You're a farmer. Nothing ever means to-morrow to me."
"I can't believe that, Yeoland—not now that you've won Honor."
Christopher did not answer, but walked on where many an acre of fern spread over the southern face of the slope.
"Here you are," he said presently, indicating a burrow and a pile of mould. "Tommy Bates found it when he was here picking sloes and told me about it. I won't be sure it isn't a fox myself; though he declares the earth to be a badger's."
"Yes, I think that dead white grass means a badger. He brought it up from the valley."
"Then Tommy was right and I'm glad, for any distinguished stranger is welcome on my ground. What does the brute eat?"
"Roots and beech mast for choice. But he's carnivorous to the extent of an occasional frog or beetle; and I'm afraid he wouldn't pass a partridge's nest if there were eggs in it."
"That's a black mark against the beggar, but I'll pretend I don't know it."
They strolled forward and Myles kept his eyes upon the ground, while Christopher watched the sunset.
"It's a singular puzzle, the things that make a man melancholy," said the latter suddenly. "Once I had a theory that any perfect thing, no matter what, must produce sadness in the human mind, simply out of its perfection."
"A country life would be a pretty miserable business if that was so—with the perfect at the door of our eyes and ears all day long."
"Then I discovered that it depended on other considerations. Love of life is concerned with it. Youth saddens nobody; but age must. Our love of life wakes our sorrow for the old who are going out of it. 'Tis the difference between a bud and a withered blossom. Sunrise makes no man sad. That's why you love it, and love to be in it, as I do. The blush of dawn is like the warm cheek of a waking child—lovely; but sunset is a dying thing. There's sadness in that, and the more beautiful, the more sad."
"I cannot see anything to call sad in one or other."
"No, I suppose you can't; you've got such a devilish well-balanced mind."
A faint shadow of annoyance if not absolute contempt lurked in the tones of the speech; but Stapledon failed to see it.
"I wish I had," he answered. "There are plenty of things in Nature that make a man sad—sounds, sights, glimpses of the eternal battle under the eternal beauty. But sadness is weakness, say what you will. There's nothing to be sentimental about really. It's because we apply our rule of thumb to her; it's because we try to measure her wide methods by our own opinions on right and justice that we find her unjust. I told Honor something of this; but she agrees with you that Nature's quite beyond apology, and won't be convinced."
"You've told her so many things lately—opened her eyes, I'm sure, in so many directions. She's as solemn as an owl sometimes when I'm with her. Certainly she doesn't laugh as often as she used to."
Myles was much startled.
"Don't say that; don't say that. She's not meant to take sober views—not yet—not yet. She's living sunlight—the embodiment of laughter, and all the world's a funny