He need not have been afraid, however, that Kit was despising him in his heart. He had forgotten him completely as he drove, as well as the ghost of Marget at his back. If he thought of him at all, it was as a boy, trudging to school or running about the marsh. Sometimes, indeed, he went back so far that Bob had not even begun to exist. Perhaps he lingered longest at that stage, because the mind is coming full circle at the last. Youth must inherit heaven as well as the earth, because most of us are made young again at the end. Bob’s words came out of a mist that covered the immediate past, like the gulls he had often heard crying over a foggy sea. He slipped right away from it through the years, as the swifts dipped and dropped about the steeple under the hill. But no matter where he was, the things around him were always good. The steady sun warmed him and the air was cool in his throat. His eyes rested themselves on hedge and dyke, and line upon long line of sand; but all the time he saw as much with his heart as with his eyes. All the days that had found him on that road were present with him to-night;—golden days, such as this, and the quiet, grey days that seemed scarcely to draw a breath from dawn to dusk. On those days the whole world was grey, not as if hidden by a veil, but grey-washed by a broad yet feathery brush. Wet days, many and long, when the rain blowing in from the sea was as level as the sun; mornings, fiercely cold, with the north wind dropping straight from the high snows; evenings, drenched with mist and haunted by pale sheaves, peering over the road at the lapping tide. Moons world without end he had seen stand over the marsh, the first moon of the year, light and thin as the edge of a tossed coin, to the great harvest moon that was not like an English moon at all. There was something in the nature of Divine revelation about the moon that came with the sheaves, a touch of the mystical meaning that shone so plain from the Bethlehem Star. It was not only that it was so big and bright, as if it had really eaten all the rest. It had a tremendous personality of its own, a calm force that could be felt. You were never alone on the marsh while a moon walked with you there; but when the harvest moon rose up, it was like a majestic stranger in a room. Days of storm, when he had to fight his way at his horse’s head; and whirling snow-days, with the ditches level with the road. Summer, when the tall grasses almost hid the dykes, and the tall hedges all but hid the fields. Spring, with a wail beside that of the curlew in the air, and lambs like new flowers all over the coloured carpet by the sea.