Suddenly he had a vision. A landscape appeared before him. There was a path bordered by tall poplars in autumnal foliage, a path of mud, of black morass. On either side of it the heath stretched to infinity. There were the black, triangular silhouettes of a few huts, with windows red from the hearth-fires within. Here and there were puddles of dirty, yellow water, which reflected the grey sky and in which tree-trunks rotted. Over the whole scene was a whitish twilight, and in the distance emerged the rude form of a shepherd; and in that distance was a mass of egg-shaped bodies, half of wool, half of slime, that jostled one another. It was the herd of sheep. With gloom and difficulty they crept along the muddy path to a farmstead--a few mossy roofs of straw and turf amid the poplars. There was the dark sheepfold. Its open door showed a cavernous blackness; but through chinks in the back wall of the sheepfold flickered faint glints of the twilight. The caravan of wool and slime disappeared in the cavern. The shepherd and a woman with a lantern closed the door. How was it that the invisible-visible presence of Ruth evoked this landscape in his soul? He had never, so far as he knew, seen such a landscape. How did it happen that this landscape exhaled something calming and shattering at once, yearning and fear--that it had power over him as scarcely any human fate or form or face? And how did it come to pass that Ruth’s “no, never, nevermore,” seemed the mysterious meaning of this landscape, the symbol of this vision? Ruth, little Ruth! Grief and sadness entered into Christian’s very marrow. XXIV Crammon had determined to stay only one week at the Villa Ophelia. In the first place he did not like to prolong the family idyl beyond decent and appropriate limits. In the second place his programme, which he was not in the habit of changing except for catastrophes, demanded his departure for England. But the one week merged into a second, and the second into a third. At the end of the third week he was still unable to come to a decision. He was rancorous against his surroundings and against himself, and as whimsical as a woman. He blamed himself, accused himself of senile indecision, and was full of bitter dissatisfaction with the slovenliness of the countess’s establishment. The cuisine was, in his view, too greasy, and threatened to upset his sensitive digestion; the servants were not properly respectful, because their wages were too often in arrears. The constant stream of guests was generally lacking in nothing so much as in distinction. There were second-rate musicians and poets and painters, and women of the same calibre. Furthermore there were aristocrats of doubtful reputation. In brief, a gathering of parasites, the thriftless, the unprofitable. Among them Crammon had the appearance of a relic of an exalted and hieratic age.