He tried to occupy himself in his book, but in vain. Now that he was confronted with a real and urgent dilemma, the origins of religion seemed to him to have no meaning or interest. He did not feel that they had any bearing whatever upon life; and his pain seemed to infect all his perceptions. The quality of beauty in common things, the hill-shapes, the colour of field and wood, the lights of dawn and eve, the sailing cloud, the tints of weathered stone, the old house in its embowered garden, with the pure green lines of the down above, had no charm or significance for him any more. Again and again he said to himself, "How beautiful that would be, if I could but feel it to be so!" He saw, as clearly and critically as ever, the pleasant forms and hues and groupings of things, but it was dull and savourless, while all the attractive ideas that sprang up like flowers in his mind, the happy trains of thought, in which some single fancy ramified and extended itself into unsuspected combinations and connections, these all seemed hardly worth recognising or pursuing. He found himself listless and distracted, just able by an effort to talk, to listen, to exchange thoughts, but utterly without any zest or energy. Jack had gone off for a short visit, and Howard was thus left mostly alone. He went once or twice to the Vicarage, but found Mr. Sandys an unmixed trial; there seemed something wholly puerile about his absurd energies and activities. The only boon of his society was that he expected no reply to his soliloquies. Maud was there too, a distant graceful figure; but she, too, seemed to have withdrawn into her own thoughts, and their talk was mostly formal. Yet he was painfully and acutely conscious of her presence. She, too, seemed to be clouded and sad. He found himself unable to talk to her unconstrainedly. He could only dumbly watch her; she appeared to avert her eyes from him; and yet he drew from these meetings an infinite series of pictures, which were as if engraved upon his brain. She became for him in these days like a lily drooping in a shadowed place and in a thunderous air; something fading away mutely and sorrowfully, like the old figure of Mariana in the Grange, looking wearily through listless hours for something which had once beckoned to her with a radiant gesture, but which did not return. There were brighter hours, when in the hot July days a little peace fell on him, a little sense of the fragrance and beauty of the world. He took to long and solitary walks on the down in search of bodily fatigue. There was one day in particular which he long remembered, when he had gone up to the camp, and sate in the shade of the thicket on the crisp turf, looking out over the valley, unutterably quiet and peaceful in the hot air. The trees were breathlessly still; the hamlet roofs peeped out above the orchards, the hot air quivered on the down. There were little figures far below moving about the fields.