Besides these attractions, Lanty had a ghost of his own, and half his joy in the lane lay in wondering if he should find it. It was a very deep lane. You had to look up and up before you saw the feathery tops kissing the sky, and you walked between, very warm and safe and quiet, listening with all your ears at once. And then, all of a sudden, there would be a break on the lower side, and over a couple of moss-grown bars, or an ancient gate thrust in at any and every beautiful angle, you would see the lovely land sweeping down and out beneath you, and rising slowly, slowly again to soft curves and blue vapours. They came all along the lane, these flashing little peeps of a world shut out, like cloister vignettes in some silent Abbey. Your heart went before you hungrily to each, yet was loth to leave any for the next. And which was more dear, the tender quiet or the land through its living frame, it would have been hard to say. Lancaster called the peeps his Green Gates of Vision. He stopped at the first of all, and his Ghost was there to meet him, a long, faint, knife-edged mountain, flung like a cloud against the south-west sky. It was often missing, and at its clearest the mass of it was no more than a blown web, yet the line of it had always the quivering sharpness of steel. He had grown to believe that the sight of it brought him luck, this Ghost-Mountain of his, so christened because it never seemed but the ghost of a hill, edged with the spirit-fire of something safe escaped from clogging matter. Its absence did not depress him, but its presence, sprung suddenly upon his cloistered walk, always made his heart leap, as at an unexpected promise of goodwill. He welcomed it to-day when he was weary and out of tune, and he leaned his arms on the weathered timber with a sense of rest, drawing his gaze slowly back from the far symbol to the country close at hand. Four or five dropping fields away, Rakestraw stood in its sheath of woods, the new hay thick in the grey Dutch barns. There were rooks’ nests in the trees overhanging the house; even at that distance he could see them. That meant luck for Rakestraw, said the wise. He had always told himself that he would live at Rakestraw when the cease-fire sounded for the work he loved, farm it himself, lead his hay and breed his stock, and perhaps the rooks would build for him, too, as they had built for Dart Newby. He knew in his heart that he would never do it, just because it seemed so essentially the beautiful and right thing for him to do. Most of us have our dream-houses somewhere, and plot and plan their future and ours together; and whether we ever win to them or not with a signed conveyance, we have something of them always that is never set down in any legal bond.