wild skies. She tried to write and could not. Something older
and more powerful than her genius had her. She suffered a resurgence of
her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its
joy in them and knew its joy again. It was on the moors that earth had
most kinship and communion with the sky. It took the storms of heaven.
Its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the
likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. On the moors it was an
endless passing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance.

And she had her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered
these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on
the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met
in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the
sweet earth of the south-west.

Tanqueray was right. She was not to be trusted on the open moors. She
was out of doors all day. And out of doors the Idea that had driven her
forth withdrew itself. Its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond
her grasp. She was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration
and futility. If this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself,
tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not
going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at
all. It would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again.

There was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it
seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. She
got as far as looking up the trains to Waterloo.

Then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser
and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not
to go. It told her to wait, to trust to Nature's way, and to Nature's
wisdom in bringing back her youth. Nature's way was to weave over again
the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the
impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and
strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more
virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to
restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's
plan.

And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her
every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote,
assuring her that all was going well at home and urg