The feeling passed, however, as soon as he came into contact with him. Len was apparently his usual genial self, with nothing more sinister at the back of his mind than the preparations for peas and potatoes. The rest of the men arrived presently, and the gardens fell into their usual routine. By the time the sun had broken through, Kirkby was again beginning to wonder whether the letter and all that it stood for had been anything more than a dream. The very weather of yesterday, that soul-troubling weather which had helped so largely towards his decision, now seemed like a dream, too. Looking at the fresh yet quiet colouring of to-day, at outlines diamond-clear and yet soft as human breath, he found it impossible to re-imagine it. But that was the worst of weather, as he knew, even although at the same time it was the wonder of it. You were happy on the good days, feeling that they would go on for ever; but, on the other hand, the bad days seemed as if they would go on for ever, too. And the bad days were very dangerous, because they were apt to make you lose heart. On the bad days, if you were not careful what you were doing, you might find yourself signing the whole of your life away.... Yesterday had been a destructive day, so bitter and killing that it seemed as if this morning everything should have been withered; but instead of being withered things were pulsing with new vigour. Even where there was no life showing above the soil, life spoke to him from below. The air, vivifying yet soft, had that baptismal touch which comes only at one time of the year. And running all through Nature was the thrill which comes out of nowhere, like the Spirit, so that the quiet land seemed to heave and thrill like sunlit waves of sea. It came to him now that, next year, when the thrill was in the air, he would be in Canada. It would be the same thrill, he told himself hurriedly, because Nature’s magic was the same everywhere; and yet it would not be quite the same. On the soil where you had been born and bred there was always something more. Not only did you feel the thrill of the spring that was coming, but the thrill of the springs that were gone; so that, with each fresh spring on your native ground, the thrill deepened because of the past. _That_ thrill, at least, if he went to Canada, he would never feel again....