He could spare it only a moment’s greeting, but for some reason his heart was lighter as he rode on. Amid the wreck of much the Ghost-Mountain had foundered too, forgotten. Its vivid, unexpected return set a faint hope beating that somehow, through some outside power, other lost things might come to resurrection also. The spell of the “back-end” had its will again, and in spite of him caught him in its wound gossamer of remembrance. Though he looked between his horse’s ears, he knew well enough that round him on every hand were soft distances, melting, blending and changing from blue to purple and purple to gray, with filmy pillars of smoke raised like the standards of home against the stark, stripped woods. He could not keep his cheek from the mild fingers of the gentle air, nor from his lungs the smell of the fresh, damp earth, going rain- and dew-washed to its winter sleep. And under the horse’s hoofs the dry leaves rustled and the wet leaves crushed into a still, soft carpet of stamped crimson and bruised gold. Far in the amber sky a black little bird was singing, swung on a twig like a poised finger, and over Dick Crag he could hear the baffling music of tired hounds on the last spurt of the afternoon. Little by little he was taken and held by the old wonder and the familiar glory, so that the last terrible months dropped away, and his heavily self-raised prison unlocked. Through the cruel summer he had come mechanically and doggedly, with all his joy in his work gone like a blown petal, together with the quivering sympathy that had made him the perfect instrument of atmosphere and environment. For this is the last punishment of souls ordinarily attuned to Nature, when bent to the yoke of pain or sin. They cry to her, and she does not answer; she calls to them, and they do not heed; for though the eyes look abroad on the same beauty, the ears gather the same music, the spirit and meaning are fled, leaving only soulless mirages and jangled wires. But to-night Lancaster came back again to his kingdom. The look of sudden age, stamped on that far death-dawn, still clung to some extent; the stern lines of his face were hammered and set; he was thinner, and his hair had whitened a little. But for compensation he had a new self-reliance, a new quietude born of the absence of nervous struggle. His was now the unfearful poise of one who has fallen and risen again before the hammer of the gods.