The day was lusty with the red sap of youth. A myriad shafts of gold streamed upon the bourgeoning woods. The earth piled flowers in her green lap and gemmed her bosom glorious with many colors. Poplars waved their stately towers of amber athwart the blue. Wind flowers shivered in the breeze. Nature seemed a Greek girl flashing a primrose kirtle over emerald lawns. Flowers, purple and red, burned where her white feet had smitten the earth with desire. Gabriel Strong strode on towards the sea, a young Paris red and radiant from the solemn sigh of Ida’s pines. It was the man now who wandered through the meadows, threaded the woods, and climbed gaunt moorland smiting into a golden south—the man of fire and fibre, the passionate pilgrim following the wild torch of desire. Legend lore and love were brilliant in his being. In solitude he found his own strength, his own soul. Elsewhere, like the damsel in some ancient fable, it changed suddenly into a withered, morose, and quaking hag. As a man of leisure, Gabriel Strong had suffered in strength from the enervation of parental patronage. Like many men of considerable mental culture, he was content to endure the small tryannies of life, not troubling to assert his individuality against people by whom he was misunderstood. Silence is the best harness to baffle fools. He was free in his own world of thought, a serf in the domain of domestic trifles. He was amiable, somewhat indolent, a detester of argument. His father’s platitudes bored but did not rouse him. He was sleepily indifferent to trivial criticism. Consequently he had earned in the domestic circle a reputation for docility which was undeserved. The parental prejudices were beneath his horizon. He ignored them by being reservedly amiable. It was not in his nature to quarrel about the number of pips in an orange. A two hours’ pilgrimage, and the cliffs rose solemn and stupendous above the azured silver of the sea. Sinuously strong the waves rolled with lambent thunder upon the black bosoms of the rocks. Gulls winged pearl-bright over the blue. Arcs of smooth greensward cut the heavens. A solemn noise, like the superstitious murmurs of a world, rose with a multitudinous monotony from the strand. Gabriel, weary yet exultant, stretched himself on a hillock that verged the cliff. To the east dense banks of gorse were bursting into flame. To the west a deep indenture in the rocks crescented a bay whose threshold of foam and pavement of gilded sand stretched solemn under the adamantine shadows of the cliffs. Bulwarked by great buttresses of stone, a small lagoon lay sheltered from the waves. Amber, purple, and green, it glimmered in the manifold lights and shadows of the place. At flood the sea poured strife into its calm; at ebb, a fathom deep, it took its temper from the sky.