one of the glimmering or golden visions one
had of the soul in nature, glimpses of its remote 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."