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e organist, learned to draw grave litanies from the boughs and reverently voice the air of sanctity. The fresh familiar scent hung for a smokeless incense, breathing high ritual and redolent of pious mystery. No circumstance of worship was unobserved. With one consent birds, beasts and insects made not a sound. The precious pall of silence lay like a phantom cloud, unruffled. Nature was on her knees.
The car fled on.
Out of the priestless sanctuary, up over the crest of the rise, into the kiss of the sunlight we sailed, and so on to a blue-brown moor, all splashed and dappled with the brilliant yellow of the gorse in bloom and rolling away into the hazy distance like an untroubled sea. So for a mile it flowed, a lazy pomp of purple, gold-flecked and glowing. Then came soft cliffs of swelling woodland, rising to stay its course with gentle dignity--walls that uplifted eyes found but the dwindled edge of a far mightier flood that stretched and tossed, a leafy waste of billows, flaunting more living shades of green than painters dream of, laced here and there with gold and, once in a long while, shot with crimson, rising and falling with Atlantic grandeur, till the eye faltered, and the proud rich waves seemed to be breaking on the rosy sky.
And over all the sun lay dying, his crimson ebb of life staining the firmament with splendour, his mighty heart turning the dance of Death to a triumphant progress, where Blood and Flame rode by with clouds for chargers, and Earth and Sky themselves shouldered the litter of their passing King.
An exclamation of wonder broke from Adèle, and Jill cried to me to stop.
"Just for a minute, Boy, so that she can see it properly."
Obediently I slowed to a standstill. Then I backed the great car and swung up a side track for the length of a cricket-pitch. The few cubits thus added to our stature extended the prospect appreciably. Besides, it was now unnecessary to crane the neck.
At last--
"If you're waiting for me to say 'Go