Richard rode on again down the sandy road that ran like a gray streak through the waste of green. Had six months passed since he had posted back from Italy with the news of his father’s death big in his heart? Had he not left England as a boy, and returned to it something of a man, intoxicated with many delightful superstitions, and fired with a belief in the stately grandeur of the English nation. Sir Peter and his Sussex squires had tumbled Mr. Richard’s amiable theories down into their native mire. Cousin Lot had laughed and sneered at him. The Lady Letitia had assailed his soul with such worldly wisdoms as disregarded sentiment and honor. Richard had ruled his own house at Rodenham six months, built his dead father’s tomb, and attempted to ingratiate himself with the boors who crowded Rodenham village. He had rattled his poetical notions against the skulls of his Sussex peers, and half-fooled himself into imagining that he was in love with gray-eyed Mistress Jilian, his cousin, who wore flaming petticoats and preposterous hoops, and rouged and ogled like the veteran of thirty that she was. Richard Jeffray confessed himself a fool as he rode down that day through the wilds of Pevensel and cogitated upon the beauties of a rustic life. The landscape was certainly not at fault, and the man of sentiment believed himself in sympathy with nature. The human element was the poison in the pot. He supposed that these Wealden folk became, like the clay they lived upon, heavy and sodden, dedicated to the producing of wheat at sixty shillings a quarter. The sky seemed prophetic of snow, a canopy of purple clouds pressing from the north like some fate-bearing vapor of the Norse legends. The west was a great cavern of fire, with ruddy veins of glowing ore tonguing scarlet and gold across the sky. The wild, fir-spired wastes of Pevensel loomed strange and mysterious under the slanting light. There were tall thickets bannered with crimson on the hills, stretches of rusty heather and dark-green gorse, covered as with a web of gold. Now and again a vague wind would start up out of the silence, and come roaring and moaning amid the swaying trees. From Beacon Rock the road plunged suddenly into a broad valley. A tawny, iron-stained stream trickled on one side of the highway; on the other a beechwood rose towards the west, its round pillars and bronze carpeting of leaves streaked and splashed by the setting sun. A thousand intertwining branches netted the red and angry splendor of the sky.