But now all the prestige of social success, everything that was represented by the fashion he had just left, was dwindling and fading; the effect of it falling away so that it seemed to him garish and unreal--as the lights and distractions of the town may seem to a man who sets his face eagerly towards the joy of his quiet home. The rest and immensity of nature was an enduring reality with which his love was in perfect accord. He and Phyllis had their place in it. If he could step down, now, to the sombre yews at the lake’s edge and take her in his arms, as he had done a month ago, his last doubts would vanish on the instant. They would be one with the greatness of earth, and able to look down with contempt from their perfect enthronement, at the frivolous and ephemeral superficiality of conventional life.... The sound of Greatorex’s voice seemed to take up the thread of his dreams. “’Course, you’re a poet, Fell,” Greatorex said. “You feel an evening like this, I suppose? Means something quite tremendous to you?” “You see,” Fell began, trembling on the verge of confession; “there is a reason why, more particularly, to-night....” Greatorex turned round and looked at him. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “You’ll be sorry afterwards. Better not tell me. I know I look romantic, but I’m not. Harrison says I ought to have been a pirate. He’s wrong, I ought to have been a barrister. I’ll tell you, now, just what I’ve been thinking while I’ve been looking at all this view that makes you feel so sentimental. I’ve been thinking that I wouldn’t like to have a lake so near the house--unhealthy. And I don’t care for all those black yews, either. Melancholy, mournful, things.” Fell shuddered. “They _are_ mournful,” he agreed, “but they’re in keeping.” “Too much,” Greatorex said. “I don’t know whether it’s your sentimental influence or not, Fell; but, damn it, this place makes _me_ feel superstitious, to-night. It’s so infernally quiet and brooding, as if it were hatching some nasty mischief.” “Or some wonderful miracle?” Fell suggested. “We probably mean the same thing,” Greatorex said. “I’ve got a trick of using prose words to get attention. ‘Wonderful miracle,’ you know, would be either a cliché or bombast in a leader.”