Nature is a jealous mistress, but she gives openly of her best to the lover who lives with her as whole-heartedly as did Richard. He never felt the want of toys or ordinary amusements. The elation that came to him at times was very sweet and bore him far. His eye and ear presently became so well trained that from a great distance he could detect a moving object, and with the wind blowing gently towards him, and his ear to the ground, could distinguish a single footfall on a path nearly a mile away, like any scout. Blindfold, or in the dark, he made his way across Glune without a slip. Books of travels in far countries, stories of Burnham and other members of the brotherhood of the intrepid, taught him to destroy the tracks of his incoming and outgoing, so that every step of the way to special places of concealment had in it the thrill, the enchantment of an adventure. To one who has never been to a theatre, a country life becomes a beautiful play of birth and death; things move and have their being, that he may see them pass to their appointed end. The green earth is the stage, Nature the playwright, and God Himself the Great Scene Painter. Richard’s tutor, a half-blind village schoolmaster who came for three hours daily when Mrs. Farquharson could afford to pay his meagre fees, was the only "outside" person whom he ever saw. Between the boy and his mother, there was neither freedom nor confidence. He shrank away if he heard the rustle of her dress. Her presence in the house acted upon him like the presence of death. It was as if she stood with uplifted hand always ready to strike some covert blow at one of his innocent pleasures. He told her nothing; what was there to tell? She looked upon the things he loved with terror. Morning and evening found him bidden to stand, mute and resentful, beside her erect form in its accustomed place, a high-backed chair in the study where his father’s papers and diaries were collected. Her frozen lips—lips tightened into a line so hard that he always thought it must hurt her to move them, would touch his forehead stiffly in greeting, as one touches a thing with loathing and abhorrence. Of bosom throbbing at his approach, and the light of motherhood in her eyes, which she stifled as she heard him coming, he knew nothing. He would leave her rejoicing at a hard duty again accomplished. That she longed for him hungrily all day long, that she stealthily followed him to his play, that her spare tense figure was often shaken by passionate longing to clasp the slender limbs that had once lain warm and quiet beneath her heart, he never knew.