ible to tell their proportions or
distances. The skyline a mile away, beyond the Derwent, might have been
the edge of a bank a couple of yards off; the glimmering pool on the
lower meadow path might be the lighted window of a house across the
valley. There succeeded to outlines a kind of shaded tint, all worked in
gray like a print, clear enough to distinguish tree from boulder and sky
from water, yet not clear enough to show the texture of anything. The
third stage was that in which colours began to appear, yet flat and
dismal, holding, it seemed, no light, yet reflecting it; and all in an
extraordinary cold clearness. Nature seemed herself, yet struck to
dumbness. No breeze stirred the twigs overhead or the undergrowth
through which they rode. Once, as the two, riding a little apart, turned
suddenly together, up a ravine into thicker woods, they came upon a herd
of deer, who stared on them without any movement that the eye could see.
Here a stag stood with two hinds beside him; behind, Robin saw the backs
and heads of others that lay still. Only the beasts kept their eyes upon
them, as they went, watching, as if it were a picture only that went by.
So, by little and little, the breeze stirred like a waking man; cocks
crew from over the hills one to the other; dogs barked far away, till
the face of the world was itself again, and the smoke from Matstead rose
above the trees in front.

Robin had ridden in the dawn an hundred times before; yet never before
had he so perceived that strange deliberateness and sleep of the world;
and he had ridden, too, perhaps twenty times at such an hour, with his
father beside him, after mass on some such occasion. Yet it seemed to
him this time that it was the mass which he had seen, and his own
solitariness, that had illuminated his eyes. It was dreadful to him--and
yet it threw him more than ever on himself and God--that his father
would ride with him so no more. Henceforward he would go alone, or with
a servant only; he would, alone, go up to the door of house or barn and
rap four times with his riding-whip; alone he would pass upstairs
through the darkened house to the shrouded room, garret or bed-chamber,
where the group was assembled, all in silence; where presently a dark
figure would rise and light the pair of candles, and then, himself a
ghost, vest there by their light, throwing huge shadows on wainscot and
ceiling as his arms went this way and that; and then, alone of all that