a hundred, he would never meet another. Why, because of
his love, must he bury the will and force of a man? If there were no
more coherence in God's scheme than this, let him too be incoherent! Let
him hold authority, and live outside authority! Why stifle his powers
for the sake of a coherence which did not exist! That would indeed be
madness greater than that of a mad world!

There was no answer to his thoughts in the stillness of the grove, unless
it were the cooing of a dove, or the faint thudding of the sheep issuing
again into sunlight. But slowly that stillness stole into Miltoun's
spirit. "Is it like this in the grave?" he thought. "Are the boughs of
those trees the dark earth over me? And the sound in them the sound the
dead hear when flowers are growing, and the wind passing through them?
And is the feel of this earth how it feels to lie looking up for ever at
nothing? Is life anything but a nightmare, a dream; and is not this the
reality? And why my fury, my insignificant flame, blowing here and
there, when there is really no wind, only a shroud of still air, and
these flowers of sunlight that have been dropped on me! Why not let my
spirit sleep, instead of eating itself away with rage; why not resign
myself at once to wait for the substance, of which this is but the
shadow!"

And he lay scarcely breathing, looking up at the unmoving branches
setting with their darkness the pearls of the sky.

"Is not peace enough?" he thought. "Is not love enough? Can I not be
reconciled, like a woman? Is not that salvation, and happiness? What is
all the rest, but 'sound and fury, signifying nothing?"

And as though afraid to lose his hold of that thought, he got up and
hurried from the grove.

The whole wide landscape of field and wood, cut by the pale roads, was
glimmering under the afternoon sun, Here was no wild, wind-swept land,
gleaming red and purple, and guarded by the grey rocks; no home of the
winds, and the wild gods. It was all serene and silver-golden. In place
of the shrill wailing pipe of the hunting buzzard-hawks half lost up in
the wind, invisible larks were letting fall hymns to tranquillity; and
even the sea--no adventuring spirit sweeping the shore with its
wing--seemed to lie resting by the side of the land.

CHAPTER XV

When on the afternoon of that same day Miltoun did not come, all the
chilly doubts which his presence alone kept away, crowded thick and fast
into the mi