ote and brooding spirit. Here, with the sun hot on
his face, a cuckoo calling from a thorn tree, and in the air the honey
savour of gorse--here among the little fronds of the young fern, the
starry blackthorn, while the bright clouds drifted by high above the
hills and dreamy valleys here and now was such a glimpse. But in a
moment it would pass--as the face of Pan, which looks round the corner of
a rock, vanishes at your stare. And suddenly he sat up. Surely there
was something familiar about this view, this bit of common, that ribbon
of road, the old wall behind him. While they were driving he had not
been taking notice--never did; thinking of far things or of nothing--but
now he saw! Twenty-six years ago, just at this time of year, from the
farmhouse within half a mile of this very spot he had started for that
day in Torquay whence it might be said he had never returned. And a
sudden ache beset his heart; he had stumbled on just one of those past
moments in his life, whose beauty and rapture he had failed to arrest,
whose wings had fluttered away into the unknown; he had stumbled on a
buried memory, a wild sweet time, swiftly choked and ended. And, turning
on his face, he rested his chin on his hands, and stared at the short
grass where the little blue milkwort was growing....

I

And this is what he remembered.

On the first of May, after their last year together at college, Frank
Ashurst and his friend Robert Garton were on a tramp. They had walked
that day from Brent, intending to make Chagford, but Ashurst's football
knee had given out, and according to their map they had still some seven
miles to go. They were sitting on a bank beside the-road, where a track
crossed alongside a wood, resting the knee and talking of the universe,
as young men will. Both were over six feet, and thin as rails; Ashurst
pale, idealistic, full of absence; Garton queer, round-the-corner,
knotted, curly, like some primeval beast. Both had a literary bent;
neither wore a hat.

Ashurst's hair was smooth, pale, wavy, and had a way of rising on either
side of his brow, as if always being flung back; Carton's was a kind of
dark unfathomed mop. They had not met a soul for miles.

"My dear fellow," Garton was saying, "pity's only an effect of
self-consciousness; it's a disease of the last five thousand years. The
world was happier without."

Ashurst, following the clouds with his eyes, answered:

"It's the pearl in