ladness and sadness were
measured. He knew more of all this than Mount Dunstan could, since Mount
Dunstan's existence had isolated itself, from rather gloomy choice. But
as he rode, Mount Dunstan knew that he liked to hear these things.
There was the suggestion of new life and new thought in them, and such
suggestion was good for any man--or woman, either--who had fallen into
living in a dull, narrow groove.

"It is the new life in her which strikes me," he said. "She has brought
wealth with her, and wealth is power to do the good or evil that grows
in a man's soul; but she has brought something more. She might have come
here and brought all the sumptuousness of a fashionable young beauty,
who drove through the village and drew people to their windows, and made
clodhoppers scratch their heads and pull their forelocks, and children
bob curtsies and stare. She might have come and gone and left a
mind-dazzling memory and nothing else. A few sovereigns tossed here
and there would have earned her a reputation--but, by gee! to quote
Selden--she has begun LIVING with them, as if her ancestors had done it
for six hundred years. And what _I_ see is that if she had come without
a penny in her pocket she would have done the same thing." He paused a
pondering moment, and then drew a sharp breath which was an exclamation
in itself. "She's Life!" he said. "She's Life itself! Good God! what a
thing it is for a man or woman to be Life--instead of a mass of tissue
and muscle and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!"

Penzance had listened seriously.

"What you say is very suggestive," he commented. "It strikes me as true,
too. You have seen something of her also, at least more than I have."

"I did not think these things when I saw her--though I suppose I
felt them unconsciously. I have reached this way of summing her up by
processes of exclusion and inclusion. One hears of her, as you know
yourself, and one thinks her over."

"You have thought her over?"

"A lot," rather grumpily. "A beautiful female creature inevitably
gives an unbeautiful male creature something to think of--if he is not
otherwise actively employed. I am not. She has become a sort of dawning
relief to my hopeless humours. Being a low and unworthy beast, I am
sometimes resentful enough of the unfairness of things. She has too
much."

When they rode through Stornham village they saw signs of work already
done and work still in hand. There were