tremendous!  A giant in all sorts of ways probably—­” Then his thought hesitated, floundered.  There was something else he divined yet could not name.  He felt out of his depth in some entirely new way, in touch with an order of possibilities larger, more vast, more remote than any dreams his imagination even had yet envisaged.  All this, and more, the mere presence of this retired clergyman poured into his receptive and eager little soul.

And very soon it was that these nameless qualities began to assert themselves, completing the rout of Spinrobin’s moderate powers of judgment.  No practical word as to the work before them, or the duties of the new secretary, had yet passed between them.  They walked along together, chatting as equals, acquaintances, almost two friends might have done.  And on the top of the hill, after a four-mile trudge, they rested for the first time, Spinrobin panting and perspiring, trousers tucked up and splashed yellow with mud; Mr. Skale, legs apart, beard flattened by the wind about his throat, and thumbs in the slits of his waistcoat as he looked keenly about him over the darkening landscape.  Treeless and desolate hills rose on all sides.  A few tumbled-down cottages of grey stone lay scattered upon the lower slopes among patches of shabby and forlorn cultivation.  Here and there an outcrop of rock ran skywards into somber and precipitous ridges.  The October wind passed to and fro over it all, mournfully singing, and driving loose clouds that seemed to drop weighted shadows among the peaks.

III

And it was here that Mr. Skale stopped abruptly, looked about him, and then down at his companion.

“Bleak and lonely—­this great spread of bare mountain and falling cliff,” he observed half to himself, half to the other; “but fine, very, very fine.”  He exhaled deeply, then inhaled as though the great draught of air was profoundly satisfying.  He turned to catch his companion’s eye.  “There’s a savage and desolate beauty here that uplifts.  It helps the mind to dwell upon the full sweep of life instead of getting dwarfed and lost among its petty details.  Pretty scenery is not good for the soul.”  And again he inhaled a prodigious breastful of the mountain air.  “This is.”

“But an element of terror in it, perhaps, sir,” suggested the secretary who, truth to tell, preferred his scenery more smiling, and who, further, had been made suddenly aware that in this somber setting of bleak and elemental nature the great figure of his future employer assumed a certain air of grandeur that was a little too awe-inspiring to be pleasant.

“In all profound beauty there must be that,” the clergyman was saying; “fine terror, I mean, of course—­just enough to bring out the littleness of man by comparison.”