The
love which comes for these things, Cicely, is a strange, haunting thing.
You cannot escape from it. It is a sort of bondage. The winds seem to
tune themselves to your thoughts, the sunlight laughs away your
depression. Listen! Do you hear the sheep-bells from behind the hill
there? Isn't that music? Then the twilight and the darkness! If you
are on the hilltop they seem to steal down like a world of soothing
shadows. Everything that is dreary and sad seems to die away;
everywhere is a beautiful effortless peace. Cicely, I came back from
that tramp and I felt content with my lot, content to live amongst these
country folk, speak to them simply once a week of the God of mysteries,
and spend my days wandering about this little corner of the world
beautiful."
"Men have lived such lives," she said quietly, "and found happiness."
"Ay, but there is the other side," he continued, quickly. "Sometimes it
seems as though the love for these things is a beautiful delusion, a
maddening, unreal thing. Then I know that my God is not their God, that
my thoughts would be heresy to them. I feel that I want to cast off the
strange passionate love for the place which holds me here, to go out
into the world and hold my place amongst my fellows.
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