"There he is again," said Laura. "Sh! don't laugh so loud. There! now
he's stopping again!"

"He's whistling to a bird," said Oliana. "Or talking to himself perhaps.
Do you think he's quite right in his head?"

"Sh! The mistress'll hear."

It was no less a person than the master of Loreng himself whose
proceedings struck them as so comic.

Peer it was, wandering about in the great neglected garden, with his
hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers and his cap on the back of
his head, stopping here and there, and moving on again as the fancy
took him. Sometimes he would hum a snatch of a song, and again fall
to whistling; here he would pick up a twig and look at it, or again
it might be a bird, or perhaps an old neglected apple-tree that seemed
worth stopping to talk to. The best of it was that these were his own
lands and his own woods that lay there in the rusty October sunshine.
Was all that nothing? And the hill over on the farther shore, standing
on its head in the dark lake-mirror, clothed in a whole world of
colour--yellow leaves and green leaves, and light red and dark red, and
golden and blood-red patches, with the dark green of the pines between.
His eyes had all this to rest on. Did he really live here? What abundant
fruitfulness all around him! What a sky, so wide, so golden that it
seemed to ring again. The potato-stalks lay uprooted, scattered on the
fields; the corn was safely housed. And here he stood. He seemed again
to be drawing in nourishment from all he saw, drinking it greedily.
The empty places in his mind were filled; the sight of the rich soft
landscape worked on his being, giving it something of its own abundant
fruitfulness, its own wide repose.

And--what next?

"What next?" he mimicked in his thoughts, and started again tramping up
and down the garden paths. What next--what next? Could he not afford
now to take his time--to rest a little? Every man must have an end in
view--must strive to reach this goal or that. And what was his object
now? What was it he had so toiled for, from those hard years in the
loft above the stable even until now? What was it? Often it seemed as if
everything were going smoothly, going of itself; as if one day, surely,
he would find his part in a great, happy world-harmony. But had he not
already found it? What more would he have? Of course he had found it.

But is this all, then? What is there behind and beyond? Hush! have done
with questioning. Look a