er sensuous dreaming
that had crept over her.

The hand that held her palette had dropped upon her knee, her eyes were
lifted to the spectacle before her, and her lips, slightly parted,
breathed in pleasure.

She looked on a pair of mountains of which one, torn and seamed from top
to toe as though some vast Fafnir of the prime had wreaked his dragon
rage upon it, fronted her sheer, rimmed with gold where some of its
thrusting edges still caught the sunset, but otherwise steeped in purple
shades already prophesying night; while the other, separated from the
first by a gap, yet grouping with it, ran slanting away to the northwest,
offering to the eyes only a series of lovely foreshortened planes, rising
from the valley, one behind the other, sweeping upward and backward to
the central peak of Skiddaw, and ablaze with light from base to summit.

The evenings in the north are long. It was past seven on this May day;
yet Lydia knew that the best of the show was still to come; she waited
for the last act, and refused to think of supper. That golden fusion of
all the upper air; that "intermingling of Heaven's pomp," spread on the
great slopes of Skiddaw--red and bronze and purple, shot through each
other, and glorified by excess of light; that sharpness of the larch
green on the lower slopes; that richness of the river fields; that
shining pageantry of cloud, rising or sinking with the mountain line:
pondering these things, absorbing them, she looked at her drawing from
time to time in a smiling despair; the happy despair of the artist, who
amid the failure of to-day looks forward with passion to the effort of
to-morrow.

Youth and natural joy possessed her.

What scents from the river-bank, under the softly breathing wind which
had sprung up with the sunset! The girl brought her eyes down, and saw a
bank of primroses, and beyond, in the little copse on the farther side of
the stream, a gleam of blue, where the wild hyacinth spread among the
birches. While close to her, at her very feet, ran the stream, with its
slipping, murmuring water, its stones splashed with white, purple, and
orange, its still reaches paved with evening gold.

"What a mercy I wrote that letter!" she said to herself, with a sigh of
content. She was thinking of a proposal that had come to her a few days
before this date, to take a post as drawing mistress in a Brighton
school. The salary was tempting; and, at the moment, money was more than
usually