The priest stood, hushed, and motionless as a statue, contemplating this suggestive panorama. But little of its transparent beauty passed the surface of his consciousness. He was absorbed, rapt, intent. But the cause of his abstraction was not the diaphanous air-spaces above him or the dark earth beneath him; it was the pouring of the waves of divine love through his inmost being; it was his fusion with that great Spirit of the Beyond which renders its votaries independent of space and time. After long exquisite moments of this high exultation, his mind gradually resumed its normal functioning. A cynical interpreter of this sublime experience would doubtless have attributed the whole phenomenon to a natural reaction of the priest, back to his habitual moral temper, from the turbulent perturbations of the recent days. Would such a one have found it a mere coincidence that at the moment of regaining his natural vision the clergyman’s attention was arrested by the slow passage of a huge white cloud towards the Leonian promontory, a cloud that assumed, as it moved, gigantic and almost human lineaments? Coincidence or not, Clavering’s attention was not allowed to remain fixed upon this interesting spectacle. It seemed as though his return to ordinary human consciousness was destined to be attended by the reappearance of ordinary humanity. He perceived in the great sloping field on the eastern side of the mount the white figure of a woman, walking alone. For the moment his heart stood still; but a second glance reassured him. He knew that figure, even in the dying light. It was little Vennie Seldom. Simultaneously with this discovery he was suddenly aware that he was no longer the only frequenter of the woody solitudes of Nevilton Hill. On a sort of terrace, about a hundred yards below him, there suddenly moved into sight a boy and a girl, walking closely interlinked and whispering softly. Acting mechanically, and as if impelled by an impulse from an external power, he sank down upon his knees and spied upon them. They too slipped into a semi-recumbent posture, apparently upon the branches of a fallen tree, and proceeded, in blissful unconsciousness of any spectator, to indulge in a long and passionate embrace. From where he crouched Clavering could actually discern these innocents’ kisses, and catch the little pathetic murmurings of their amorous happiness. His heart beat wildly and strangely. In his fingers he clutched great handfuls of earth. His thoughts played him satyrish and fantastic tricks. Suddenly he leapt to his feet and stumbled away, like an animal that has been wounded. He encountered the Thyrsus-shaped tower--that queer fancy of eighteenth century leisure--and beat with his hands upon its hard smooth surface. After a second or two, however, he recovered his self-control; and to afford some excuse to his own mind for his mad behaviour, he walked deliberately round the edifice, looking for its entrance. This he