dness, and
neither was silence pain.

* * *

"The future?" she said at last, "that means something that one has not,
and that is to come--is it so?" "Something that one never has, and that
never comes," muttered the old man, wearily cracking the flints in two;
"something that one possesses in one's sleep, and that is farther off
each time that one awakes; and yet a thing that one sees always, sees
even when one lies a dying they say--for men are fools."

* * *

In one of the most fertile and most fair districts of northern France
there was a little Norman town, very, very old, and beautiful
exceedingly by reason of its ancient streets, its high peaked roofs, its
marvellous galleries and carvings, its exquisite greys and browns, its
silence and its colour, and its rich still life.

Its centre was a great cathedral, noble as York or Chartres; a
cathedral, whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose innumerable towers
and pinnacles were all pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone
and the birds of the air flew all through them. A slow brown river,
broad enough for market boats and for corn barges, stole through the
place to the sea, lapping as it went the wooden piles of the houses, and
reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, the hues of the signs and
the draperies, the dark spaces of the dormer windows, the bright heads
of some casement-cluster of carnations, the laughing face of a girl
leaning out to smile on her lover.

All around it lay the deep grass unshaven, the leagues on leagues of
fruitful orchards, the low blue hills tenderly interlacing one another,
the fields of colza, where the white head-dress of the women-workers
flashed in the sun like a silvery pigeon's wing. To the west there were
the deep green woods, and the wide plains golden with gorse of Arthur's
and of Merlin's lands; and beyond, to the northward, was the dim
stretch of the ocean breaking on a yellow shore, whither the river ran,
and whither led straight shady roads, hidden with linden and with poplar
trees, and marked ever and anon by a wayside wooden Christ, or by a
little murmuring well crowned with a crucifix.

A beautiful, old, shadowy, ancient place: picturesque everywhere; often
silent, with a sweet sad silence that was chiefly broken by the sound of
bells or the chaunting of choristers. A place of the Middle Ages still.
With lanterns swinging on cords from house to house as the only li