It produced in Bates unthinking irritation that Nature should quietly go on outspreading her evening magnificence in face of his discomfort.  In ordinal light or darkness one accepts the annoyances of life as coming all in the day’s work; but Nature has her sublime moments in which, if the sensitive mind may not yield itself to her delight, it is forced into extreme antagonism, either to her or to that which withholds from joining in her ecstasy.  Bates was a man sensitive to many forces, the response to which within him was not openly acknowledged to himself.  He was familiar with the magnificence of sunsets in this region, but his mind was not dulled to the marvel of the coloured glory in which the daylight so often culminated.

He looked off at the western sky, at first chiefly conscious of the unhappy girl who stood in front of him and irritated by that intervening shape; but, as his vision wandered along the vast reaches of illimitable clouds and the glorious gulfs of sky, his mind yielded itself the rather to the beauty and light.  More dusky grew the purple of the upper mists whose upright layers, like league-long wings of softest feather held edge downward to the earth, ever changed in form without apparent movement.  More sparkling glowed the gold upon their edges.  The sky beneath the cloud was now like emerald.  The soft darkness of purple slate was on the hills.  The lake took on a darker shade, and daylight began to fade from the upper blue.

It was only perhaps a moment—­one of those moments for which time has no measurement—­that the soul of this man had gone out of him, as it were, into the vastness of the sunset; and when he recalled it his situation took on for him a somewhat different aspect.  He experienced something of that temporary relief from personal responsibility that moments of religious sentiment often give to minds that are unaccustomed to religion.  He had been free for the time to disport himself in something infinitely larger and wider than his little world, and he took up his duty at the point at which he had left it with something of this sense of freedom lingering with him.

He was a good man—­that is, a man whose face would have made it clear to any true observer that he habitually did the right in contradistinction to the wrong.  He was, moreover, religious, and would not have been likely to fall into any delusion of mere sentiment in the region of religious emotion.  But that which deludes a man commonly comes through a safe channel.  As a matter of fact, the excitement which the delight of the eye had produced in him was a perfectly wholesome feeling, but the largeness of heart it gave him at that moment was unfortunate.

The girl stood just as before, ungainly and without power of expression because undeveloped, but excitation of thought made what she might become apparent to him in that which she was.  He became more generous towards her, more loving.