bring the young man to a sense of his own value."

CHAPTER VIII

MR. WRATISLAW'S ADVENT

As the three men went home in the dusk they talked of the day. Lewis
had been in a bad humour, but the company of his friends exorcised the
imp of irritation, and he felt only the mellow gloom of the evening and
the sweet scents of the moor. In such weather he had a trick of walking
with his head high and his nostrils wide, sniffing the air like the wild
ass of the desert with which the metaphorical George had erstwhile
compared him. That young man meanwhile was occupied with his own
reflections. His good nature had been victimized, he had been made to
fetch and carry continually, and the result was that he had scarcely
spoken a word to Miss Wishart. His plans thus early foiled, nothing
remained but to draw the more fortunate Arthur, so in a conspirator's
aside he asked him his verdict. But Arthur refused to speak. "She is
pretty and clever," he said, "and excellent company." And with this his
lips were sealed, and his thoughts went off on his own concerns.

Lewis heard and smiled. The sun and wind of the hills beat in his
pulses like wine. To have breathed all day the fragrance of heather and
pines, to have gladdened the eye with an infinite distance and blue
lines of mountain, was with this man to have drunk the cup of
intoxicating youth. The cool gloaming did not chill; rather it was the
high and solemn aftermath of the day's harvesting. The faces of
gracious women seemed blent with the pageant of summer weather; kindly
voices, simple joys--for a moment they seemed to him the major matters in
life. So far it was pleasing fancy, but Alice soon entered to disturb
with the disquieting glory of her hair. The family of the Haystouns had
ever a knack of fine sentiment. Fantastic, unpractical, they were
gluttons for the romantic, the recondite, and the dainty. But now had
come a breath of strong wind which rent the meshes of a philandering
fancy. A very new and strange feeling was beginning to make itself
known. He had come to think of Alice with the hot pained affection
which makes the high mountains of the world sink for the time to a
species of mole-hillock. She danced through his dreams and usurped all
the paths of his ambition. Formerly he had thought of himself--for the
man was given to self-portraiture--as the adventurer, the scorner of the
domestic; now he struggled to regain the old attitude, but he struggled
in vain. T