But he found that he could not think of either his lasses or his lads as he climbed the shallow steps which guided him up the rock-garden, strive as he might to picture them in their far homes under that high sky of which Mattie had spoken so often and so fondly. They were not real to him on this ground where, the instant he set foot on it, he relinquished his own manhood. Always they slipped away from him as ghosts might slip away. He had, indeed, one rather frightening moment when he found that he could not even remember their names. He wandered for a long time in his country of the past, including both past and present in his gesture of farewell. At point after point along the paths he stopped to dream and stare, seeing the long, plant-carpeted terraces which he had planned, and could not have told whether they were the old or the new things that he saw. But in any case it did not matter. The old and the new were fused for the time being to make a greater loveliness, a finer air; that special atmosphere in which he lived again his own enchanted youth, and was permeated, as he looked, by the happiness which is a foretaste of the happiness of eternity. Some inward monitor brought him back again at last to the raft, set his fingers to the stiff handle, and pushed him off across the quiet water. The mist was high above the river by now, so that, as he passed into it, he was lost to sight from either bank, with only the melancholy creaking of the machinery to locate his whereabouts. But he did not feel lost, because of the coloured picture of youth which still glowed and moved upon the vaporous canvas before him. He was still at peace, still sure both of this world and the next, when he met the further bank with a sudden shock. There came back to him with the shock the realisation not only of his physical but of his mental position. Climbing up the wood-edged steps, he rose both out of the mist and out of the boyhood dream which had so contentedly ensnared him. He looked back for a moment before turning resolutely towards the Hall, and saw the mist lying like a shroud, not only upon the river, but upon the precious things of his own past.