day, through all that August, morning and evening were wrapped
in haze; day after day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the air was
strange, unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes and sauntered by the
cool sweet verge of the woods, he saw and felt that nothing was common or
accustomed, for the sunlight transfigured the meadows and changed all the
form of the earth. Under the violent Provencal sun, the elms and beeches
looked exotic trees, and in the early morning, when the mists were thick,
the hills had put on an unearthly shape.

The one adventure of the holidays was the visit to the Roman fort, to
that fantastic hill about whose steep bastions and haggard oaks he had
seen the flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before. Ever since
that Saturday evening in January, the lonely valley had been a desirable
place to him; he had watched the green battlements in summer and winter
weather, had seen the heaped mounds rising dimly amidst the drifting
rain, had marked the violent height swim up from the ice-white bulwarks
glimmer and vanish in hovering April twilight. In the hedge of the lane
there was a gate on which he used to lean and look down south to where
the hill surged up so suddenly, its summit defined on summer evenings not
only by the rounded ramparts but by the ring of dense green foliage that
marked the circle of oak trees. Higher up the lane, on the way he had
come that Saturday afternoon, one could see the white walls of Morgan's
farm on the hillside to the north, and on the south there was the stile
with the view of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage smoke; but down in the hollow,
looking over the gate, there was no hint of human work, except those
green and antique battlements, on which the oaks stood in circle,
guarding the inner wood.

The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hot
August weather. Standing, or as his headmaster would have said, "mooning"
by the gate, and looking into that enclosed and secret valley, it seemed
to his fancy as if there were a halo about the hill, an aureole that
played like flame around it. One afternoon as he gazed from his station
by the gate the sheer sides and the swelling bulwarks were more than ever
things of enchantment; the green oak ring stood out against the sky as
still and bright as in a picture, and Lucian, in spite of his respect for
the law of trespass, slid over the gate. The farmers and their men were
busy on the uplands with the h