This reaction from a more expectant, or a more stoic, mood was due to many things--physical exhaustion, that sentiment of isolation, more than all, perhaps, to a doubt which had been slowly forming in his mind as to the reality of the prospect he had pictured for himself. That doubt had not until latterly come to haunt and disturb him; there had been no room for it to germinate in the fullness and novelty of the preceding days. He had found the greater world, on this his first excursion into it, wonderful enough, but wonderful more by reason of its spiritual renaissance than its material features. He did not, of course, put it in that way, or realise that the spirit abroad was in any sense other than the spirit he might have expected to encounter. But in fact it was different, and he himself was unconsciously infected by it. There was something stirring throughout the land which had not been there before, a mental enlargement, a broadening view, a sense of the wider aspects of nationality. It was like the wind that comes with the turn of the ebb tide, the waking breath of a dreamer who has been far and seen strange things, the burden of a rumour that the world was vaster than men had supposed, and that men were freer than they had supposed to explore it. Expansion was in the air, a throb of drums and ring of enterprise, a vision as of a new dawn breaking over the still smoking ruins of feudalism and intolerance. And of this sense of shining spaciousness, having England for its vivid nucleus, was somehow the prevalent atmosphere, into which Brion had entered to feel without knowing it its buoyancy and inspiration. He had ridden in it day by day; it had exalted his young spirit, and painted for him in befitting colours the goal for which they made. That he had always pictured to himself as something stately and important, meet dwelling for the dignified leisure of one who had been great but had done with greatness, a family seat in the ample sense. In vision, even, he had seen it as a mystic castle on a hill, with himself, a knight in silvery armour, riding up to its portcullis.