One May morning Richard sat at his open window, looking over the park towards Rodenham village and the purple slopes of Pevensel. There had been no Maying in the village that month, and the blackthorn and the broom, the palm and wild-cherry, had escaped unbroken, for though the pest appeared to have spent its malice, death had entered many of the cottages. George Gogg, of the Wheat Sheaf, had lost his daughter, a plump, black-haired, bright-eyed wench, whose red cheeks and red ribbons had turned many a young farmer’s head. Old Sturtevant, the cobbler, had gone the way of all flesh, and several more of the villagers, men, women, and children, were lying under the green-sward in Rodenham church-yard. As for Jeffray, he was but in a feeble way himself, and Surgeon Stott had decreed it that he was to be troubled with no news from the outer world as yet. Richard, muffled up in a dressing-gown, with dusky mottlings covering his thin face, sat before the open window and looked out over the park. The disease had seized him sharply, but not dangerously, and even Richard had vanity enough to feel some satisfaction at Surgeon Stott’s verdict that he would be left with few scars. There is a delicious languor in convalescence when the world seems to spread itself anew before the reawakened eyes, and life is reborn like a dream of renewed youth into the heart. Nature seems to welcome the exile with smiling eyes and soft breathings of her green-clad bosom. So might it have been for Richard that spring day as he saw the great trees standing so calm and still under the blue heavens, and the green billows of the park a-glisten under the sun. Sickness is held to solemnize the soul, to chasten the understanding, and purge the passion out of man. It is considered to be a season of severe self-judgment, and of inward searchings of the heart, a season when religious impulses should struggle to the surface, and solemn promises be made to propitiate the god who has granted health. Such is the orthodox exposition of the doctrine of disease. The pious hand points to the precipice that has provided the mortal with a chance of realizing the abysses of the unknown. But with Jeffray his recovery was as the coming forth of a moth from the cramping sack of custom. He had much to repent of in the past, but the repentance was romantic rather than religious. It was a lifting up of the hands to the light, not the wan and sickly light of prosaic morality, but the glow of the instincts that burn on the altar of nature, the life fire of love, of wonder, and of worship.