should ever have been infatuated with Poppy seemed to him now incredible, monstrous.  In the last three weeks he had not only grown sober, but mature.  That youth of his which once seemed immortal, had then ceased to be a part of him.  He had cut himself loose from it and put it behind him with all its miseries and tumults and pollutions.  But he couldn’t get rid of it.  Like an unclean spirit cast out of him it seemed to have entered into Dicky as into a convenient herd of swine.  And in Dicky’s detestable person it rose up against him and pursued him.  For Dicky, though sensual as any swine, was cautious.  Dicky, even with an unclean spirit in him, was not in the least likely to rush violently down any steep place into the sea and so perish out of his life.

That Dicky should have appeared on his last night here seemed the vilest stroke that fate had dealt him yet.  But Dicky could not follow him up Harcombe Hill.

He looked before him.  The lights of Harmouth opened out a thin line to the esplanade, dividing the sea from the land by fire instead of foam; strewn in the bed of the valley they revealed, as through some pure and liquid medium, its darkness and its depth.  Above them the great flank of Muttersmoor stretched like the rampart of the night.  Night itself was twilight against that black and tragic line.

And Rickman, standing bareheaded on the hillside, was lifted up out of his immense misery and unrest.  He remembered how this land that he loved so passionately had once refused him the inspiration that he sought.  And now it seemed to him that it could refuse him nothing, that Nature under cover of the darkness gave up her inmost ultimate secret.  And if it be true that Nature’s innermost ultimate secret is known only to the pure, it was a sign of his own cleansing, this sense of comfort and reconciliation, of unspoiled communion, of profound immeasurable peace.  In that moment his genius seemed to have passed behind veils upon veils of separation, to possess that tender and tragic beauty, to become one with the soul of the divine illimitable night.

He was not in the least deceived as to the true source of his inspiration.  In all this, if you went back far enough, his body counted; his body which he had made a house of shame and hunger and desire, shaken by its own shivering nerves and leaping desperate pulses.  But what of that now?  What matter, since that tumult of his blood had set throbbing such subtle, such infinite vibrations in his soul. That was what counted.  He could tell by it the quality and immensity of his passion, by just that spiritual resonance and response.  It was the measure of Lucia’s power to move him, the measure too of his nearness to her no less than of his separation.

She could not take away what she had given; and among his sources of inspiration, of the unique and unforgettable secret that had passed into him with the night, on Harcombe Hill, as he looked towards Muttersmoor, she also counted.  She would be always there, a part of it, a part of him, whether she would or no—­if that was any consolation.