It seemed to draw him to itself and into itself. It seemed to him as if, as he gazed, two little doors opened somewhere in his breast and his soul flew out like a white bird into the distant west. He knew that his body was still standing by the window, but he himself was away there among the purple and crimson and gold. He was walking yonder sunlit shining shore that bent round to form a bay for a golden sea. He was climbing yonder range of mountain peaks--peaks which, though built of unsubstantial cloud, were more beautiful than any show-place of the tourist’s seeking--peaks upon whose shining summit the soul might stand and look out upon the infinite--peaks which might be climbed by the fancy of those whose fortune it might never be to see an Alpine height. And when the purple and crimson had faded into citron, and the citron into gray; when the gold had paled to silver and darkened to lead; and the bird had fluttered back like a frightened thing to his breast--then the little boy would creep downstairs again, dry-eyed, but sad at heart with a strange sense of loneliness and loss. As I sat there watching the last of the sunset, that little boy seemed to look out at me with desolate reproachful eyes, asking what the man had to give the boy in exchange for his dreams. Then a bat flew by, so closely that I felt the cold fanning of its wings upon my face, so suddenly that I drew back with a start and awoke to real life again. Evening was already closing in. An hour ago the setting sun had looked out over the horizon’s edge and flooded the stretch of meadow-land--now so gloomy and gray--with a burst of luminous gold which tipped every grass-blade and daisy-head with liquid fire. Now on the same horizon’s edge the gusty night-rack was gathering. The glory and the glamour were gone, and darkness was already abroad. A wind which struck a chill to the heart moaned eerily over the meadows, and white mists blotted out bush and tree. If I was to reach Baxenham before nightfall I had no time to lose; so, with a sigh for the vanished sunset and my vanished dreams, I rose to continue my walk.