Would it have cast any light either on Richard's gloom or his perplexity, had he been told that, in the place where he stood staring out on the gray, formless twilight, his mother had often sought refuge, and tasted the comfort of an assuagement of splendour. She had not appropriated the room, and it was some time before the household knew that she was in the way of going there: it was awkwardly situated in a remote part of the house and rarely used--which made its attraction for lady Lestrange. But the faithful sister did not forget where she had once found her on her knees weeping, and chose it for herself and her charge when she was gone. In a few minutes Richard arrived at the conclusion that he would be all right as soon as he got among the wine-bins of the library. He did not reflect how little of a man is he whose sense of well-being is at the mercy of a Scotch mist or a cloudy twilight. Neither did he put to himself the question whether the mending of the old leather bottles in which lie stored the varied wines of the human spirit, ought to be labour and gladness enough for the soul of a man. It is a poor substitute for food that helps us to forget the want of it. But how can we wonder when he would have no father, and claimed the black Negation, the grandmother of Chaos, as his mother! Yet was it the presence all the time of that father he refused that made it possible for him to drink the water of any poorest little well of salvation that sprang in the field of his life; and such a well was his work among books. CHAPTER XIII. _THE BEECH-TREE_. He went to bed, and after a dreamless night, rose to find the world overflowed with bliss. The sun was at his best, and every water-drop on the grass was shining all the colours of the rainbow. Surely the gems that are dug from the earth have their prototype in the dew-drops that lie on its surface. One might in a moment of sweet maundering imagine Nature hiding those sunless dew-drops of the mines in the darkness of a sweet sorrow that the youth of the morning must be so evanescent. The whole world lay before Richard his inheritance. The sunlight gave it him, a gift from the height of his heaven. What was it to Richard that the park, its trees, its grass, its dew-drops, its cattle, its shadows, belonged to sir Wilton! He never even thought of the fact! He felt them his own! Was the soft, clear, fresh, damp air, with all the unreachable soul of it, not his, because it was sir Wilton's?