But it is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our own personal share of pain.  Surely it is not possible to feel otherwise, any more than it would be possible for a man with cataract to regret the painful process by which his dim blurred sight of men as trees walking had been exchanged for clear outline and effulgent day.  The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength.  We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than a painter or a musician can wish to return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete formula.

Something like this sense of enlarged being was in Adam’s mind this Sunday morning, as he rode along in vivid recollection of the past.  His feeling towards Dinah, the hope of passing his life with her, had been the distant unseen point towards which that hard journey from Snowfield eighteen months ago had been leading him.  Tender and deep as his love for Hetty had been—­so deep that the roots of it would never be torn away—­his love for Dinah was better and more precious to him, for it was the outgrowth of that fuller life which had come to him from his acquaintance with deep sorrow.  “It’s like as if it was a new strength to me,” he said to himself, “to love her and know as she loves me.  I shall look t’ her to help me to see things right.  For she’s better than I am—­there’s less o’ self in her, and pride.  And it’s a feeling as gives you a sort o’ liberty, as if you could walk more fearless, when you’ve more trust in another than y’ have in yourself.  I’ve always been thinking I knew better than them as belonged to me, and that’s a poor sort o’ life, when you can’t look to them nearest to you t’ help you with a bit better thought than what you’ve got inside you a’ready.”

It was more than two o’clock in the afternoon when Adam came in sight of the grey town on the hill-side and looked searchingly towards the green valley below, for the first glimpse of the old thatched roof near the ugly red mill.  The scene looked less harsh in the soft October sunshine than it had in the eager time of early spring, and the one grand charm it possessed in common with all wide-stretching woodless regions—­that it filled you with a new consciousness of the overarching sky—­had a milder, more soothing influence than usual, on this almost cloudless day.  Adam’s doubts and fears melted under this influence as the delicate weblike clouds had gradually melted away into the clear blue above him.  He seemed to see Dinah’s gentle face assuring him, with its looks alone, of all he longed to know.