And whilst they looked around a little dazzled, having just emerged from the darkness of the plantation, they were conscious of a new glory in the heavens. Far away across the moorland the autumn sun had shot its last rays over the level plain and sea, and had sunk quietly to rest. It was not one of Turner's wild sunsets. There were no banks of angry clouds full of lurid coloring, flashing their glory all over the western sky. But in a different fashion it was equally beautiful. Long level streaks of transparent light, emerging from an ethereal green to a deep orange, lay stretched across the heavens, and a faint golden haze rising from the land seemed to mingle with them, and form one harmonious mass of coloring. And the air too was different--purer and rarer than the enervating atmosphere of the drowsy afternoon. Together they stood and became subject to the subtle charm of their environment. It seemed to Helen Thurwell then that a change was creeping into her life. Impersonal thought had attained a new strength and a new sweetness. But at that time she had no knowledge of what it meant. "See!" he exclaimed softly, pointly westward, "there is what Coleridge made dear to us for ever, and Byron vainly scoffed at--the 'green light that lingers in the west.'" He repeated the stanza absently, and half to himself, with a sudden oblivion of her presence-- "It were a vain endeavor, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west. I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within." She watched him as his voice sank lower and lower, and though his eyes were dry and bright, she saw a look of intense sadness sweep across his face. Almost she felt inclined to let her natural sympathy escape her--to let loose the kind and tender words which had leapt up from her heart, and even trembled upon her lips. But a rush of consciousness came, and she choked them back. Thus much she could do, but no more. She could not at that moment look upon him as the man already suspected in many quarters of a most brutal murder. For the instant, all was blotted out. Had she tried she could not at that moment have revived her own suspicions. They seemed to her like some grotesque fungi of the mind--poisonous weeds to be crushed and destroyed. But the seed was there. "Those are the saddest lines I ever read," she said quietly. "It is a true ode to dejection." "And therefore they are very precious," he answered. "It is always sweet to find your own emotions so exquisitely expressed. It is like a spiritual narcotic." "And yet--yet such poems encourage sadness, and that is morbid." He shook his head. "To be sad is not necessarily to be unhappy," he answered. "That sounds like a paradox, but it isn't! You remember the 'gentle melancholy' which Milton loved. There is something sweet in that, is there not?" "But it is not like that with you," she said quickly.