‘Sure it won’t be too much for you?’ said Harvey looking upwards to the wooded height.

‘I feel equal to anything,’ answered his companion brightly.  ’This air has given me new life.’

There was a faint colour on her cheeks, and for the first time Harvey caught an expression which reminded him of the face he had known years ago, when Mrs. Abbott looked upon life much as Alma did now.

They entered upon a rising heath, green with mosses where the moisture of a hidden stream drew downwards, brown with dead bracken on dry slopes.  Just above was a great thicket of flowering gorse; a blaze of colour, pure, aerial, as that of the sky which illumined it.  Through this they made their way, then dropped into a green nook of pasture, among sheep that raised their heads distrustfully, and loud-bleating lambs, each running to its mother.

‘If you can scale this wall, it will save us a quarter of an hour.’

‘If you can, I can,’ was the laughing reply.

Protruding boulders made it an easy clamber.  They were then at the base of Cam Bodvean, and before them rose steep mountain glades.  Mrs. Abbott gazed upwards with unspoken delight.

‘There are no paths,’ said Harvey.  ’It’s honest woodland.  Some day it will be laid out with roads and iron benches, with finger-posts, “To the summit".’

‘You think so?’

’Why, of course.  It’s the destiny of every beautiful spot in Britain.  There’ll be a pier down yonder, and a switchback railway, and leagues of lodging-houses, and brass bands.’

‘Let us hope we shall be dead.’

’Yes —­ but those who come after us?  What sort of a world will it be for Hugh?  I often think I should be wrong if I taught him to see life as I do.  Isn’t it only preparing misery for him?  I ought to make him delight in piers, and nigger minstrels, and switchbacks.  A man should belong to his time.’

‘But a man helps to make his time,’ replied Mary Abbott.

‘True.  You are hopeful, are you?’

’I try very hard to be.  What use am I, if I don’t put a few thoughts into children’s heads which will help to make their lives a little better?’

Harvey nodded.

Their feet sank in the mossy ruin of immemorial summers.  Overhead, the larch-boughs dangled green tresses, or a grove of beech shook sunlight through branches decked with translucent gold.  Now and then they came out into open spaces, where trees rent from the soil, dead amid spring’s leafage, told of a great winter storm; new grass grew thickly about the shattered trunks, and in the hollows whence the roots had been torn.  One moment they stood in shadow; the next, moved upward into a great splash of sunshine, thrown upon moss that still glistened with the dews of the night, and on splints of crag painted green and gold with lichen.  Sun or shadow; the sweet fir-scents breathed upon their faces, mingled with many a waft of perfume from little woodland plants.