his act, one who took
in the full meaning of it even more clearly than they could, because
they in their transport had not his clearness of vision. Robert
Trenholme, coming to seek them, chanced in crossing this place, thick
set with shrubs, to come near them unawares, and seeing them, and having
at the sight no power in him to advance another step or speak a word, he
let them pass joyously on their way towards home. It was not many
moments before they had passed off the scene, and he was left the only
human actor in that happy wilderness where flower and leaf and bird, the
blue firmament on high and the sparkling river, rejoiced together in the
glory of light and colour.

Trenholme crossed the path and strode through flowery tangle and woody
thicket like a giant in sudden strength, snapping all that offered to
detain his feet. He sought, he knew not why, the murmur and the motion
of the river; and where young trees stood thickest, as spearsmen to
guard the loneliness of its bank, he sat down upon a rock and covered
his face, as if even from the spirits of solitude and from his own
consciousness he must hide. He thought of nothing: his soul within him
was mad.

He had come out of his school not half an hour before, rejoicing more
than any schoolboy going to play in the glorious weather. For him there
was not too much light on the lovely autumn landscape; it was all a part
of the peace that was within him and without, of the God he knew to be
within him and without--for, out of his struggle for righteousness in
small things, he had come back into that light which most men cannot see
or believe. Just in so far as a man comes into that light he ceases to
know himself as separate, but knows that he is a part of all men and all
things, that his joy is the joy of all men, that their pain is his;
therefore, as Trenholme desired the fulfilment of his own hopes, he
desired that all hope in the world might find fruition. And because this
day he saw--what is always true if we could but see it--that joy is a
thousandfold greater than pain, the glory of the autumn seemed to him
like a psalm of praise, and he gave thanks for all men.

Thus Trenholme had walked across the fields, into these groves--but now,
as he sat by the river, all that, for the time, had passed away, except
as some indistinct memory of it maddened him. His heart was full of rage
against his brother, rage too against the woman he loved; and with this
rage warred