But then the charm of spring was in the air, and the young man was pleasantly beguiled by it. He sat down on the broad coping of the churchyard wall, lighted a cigarette, and idly watched the rooks streaming out from the rectory elms, and dropping on the fragrant, fresh-turned earth of a plough-field in the valley. He listened idly to the nimble wind that blew up from the ten-mile-distant sea, sang in the woodland above, and whispered through the dark, plume-like branches of the yews here in this sheltered piece of ground. The sky was a thin, bright blue, and across it wandered little clouds, like flocks of white sheep, herded by that same nimble wind up from the Channel. It seemed to Laurence that here, indeed, would be a pleasant enough place to lie when life was over. But then that time had by no means arrived for him yet. He felt again--as he had felt that night on board ship--that he had never done complete justice to his own capacity. Whether the fault lay in himself or in circumstance, he could not say; but he knew that neither body, nor mind, nor heart, had worked up to their full strength yet. Ambition of some notable and absorbing undertaking stirred in him. He looked out over the goodly land. Would this by no means contemptible inheritance, on the threshold of the possession of which he now stood, afford him his great opportunity? And then his thought harked back to the lovely and pathetic vision which had blessed his sleep--for, of course, he was asleep--last night. A man could find fulness of satisfaction in a great passion for such a woman--if so be she actually existed, instead of being only the ideal vision of an ideal dream. Yes, a man could go very far down that road if--if--And there Laurence, being a decent fellow, laid strong hands on his imagination. To indulge it was just simply not right, since whatever woman's existence might belong to the land of fancy, his wife, Virginia's, belonged, to the land of very positive fact. He got up, shook himself, and walked away to the rectory house, through the sunshine and shadow of the peaceful, country graveyard. VIII