Beyond, the land sloped into a pleasant tree-encompassed hollow, and I
could see the red-tiled roofs of the cottages, and the worn, grey spire
of the village church. There was scarcely a breath of wind. Everything
around me seemed to stand for peace. Many a night before I had stood
here, smoking my pipe and drinking it all in--absolutely content with
myself, my surroundings, and my life. And to-night I felt, with a certain
measure of sadness, that it could never be the same again. A few yards
behind me, in the room which I had just quitted, a man was looking death
in the face; a man, the passionate, half-told fragments of whose life had
kindled in me a whole world of new desires. These two, the man and the
girl, enemies perhaps, speaking from the opposite poles of life, had made
sad havoc with my well-ordered days. The excitement of his appeal was
perhaps more directly potent; yet there was something far more subtle,
far stranger, in my thoughts of her. She and her maid and her queer,
black-eyed poodle were creatures of flesh and blood without a doubt; yet
they had come into my life so strangely, and passed into so wonderful a
place there, that I thought of them with something of the awe which
belongs to things having in themselves some element of the mystic, if not
of the supernatural.
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