e, often intense. Every one left it to some one else to ask
another question; and when by chance some one else did so every one was
struck with admiration at any one's being able to say anything. Nick
knew the moment when he himself would take a glass of a particular port
and, surreptitiously looking at his watch, perceive it was ten o'clock.
That timepiece might as well mark 1830.

All this would be a part of the suggestion of leisure that invariably
descended upon him at Beauclere--the image of a sloping shore where the
tide of time broke with a ripple too faint to be a warning. But there
was another admonition almost equally sure to descend upon his spirit
during a stroll in a summer hour about the grand abbey; to sink into it
as the light lingered on the rough red walls and the local accent of the
children sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of
England--a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals
of the place were sensibly, heavily in the air--foundations bafflingly
early, a great monastic life, wars of the Roses, with battles and blood
in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries,
all corn-fields and magistrates and vicars--and these things were
connected with an emotion that arose from the green country, the rich
land so infinitely lived in, and laid on him a hand that was too ghostly
to press and yet somehow too urgent to be light. It produced a throb he
couldn't have spoken of, it was so deep, and that was half imagination
and half responsibility. These impressions melted together and made a
general appeal, of which, with his new honours as a legislator, he was
the sentient subject. If he had a love for that particular scene of life
mightn't it have a love for him and expect something of him? What fate
could be so high as to grow old in a national affection? What a fine
sort of reciprocity, making mere soreness of all the balms of
indifference!

The great church was still open and he turned into it and wandered a
little in the twilight that had gathered earlier there. The whole
structure, with its immensity of height and distance, seemed to rest on
tremendous facts--facts of achievement and endurance--and the huge
Norman pillars to loom through the dimness like the ghosts of heroes.
Nick was more struck with its thick earthly than with its fine spiritual
reference, and he felt the oppression of his conscience as he walked
slowly about. It was in