Before long, the carriage was stopped that he might enjoy one of the pleasantest views in the neighbourhood of the city.  A gate, interrupting a high bank with which the road was bordered, gave admission to the head of a great cultivated slope, which fell to the river Exe; hence was suddenly revealed a wide panorama.  Three well-marked valleys—­those of the Creedy, the Exe, and the Culm—­ spread their rural loveliness to remote points of the horizon; gentle undulations, with pasture and woodland, with long winding roads, and many a farm that gleamed white amid its orchard leafage, led the gaze into regions of evanescent hue and outline.  Westward, a bolder swell pointed to the skirts of Dartmoor.  No inappropriate detail disturbed the impression.  Exeter was wholly hidden behind the hill on which the observers stood, and the line of railway leading thither could only be descried by special search.  A foaming weir at the hill’s foot blended its soft murmur with that of the fir branches hereabouts; else, no sound that the air could convey beyond the pulsing of a bird’s note.

All had alighted, and for a minute or two there was silence.  When Peak had received such geographical instruction as was needful, Warricombe pointed out to him a mansion conspicuous on the opposite slope of the Exe valley, the seat of Sir Stafford Northcote.  The house had no architectural beauty, but its solitary lordship amid green pastures and tracts of thick wood declared the graces and privileges of ancestral wealth.  Standing here alone, Godwin would have surveyed these possessions of an English aristocrat with more or less bitterness; envy would, for a moment at all events, have perturbed his pleasure in the natural scene.  Accompanied as he was, his emotion took a form which indeed was allied to envy, but had nothing painful.  He exulted in the prerogatives of birth and opulence, felt proud of hereditary pride, gloried that his mind was capable of appreciating to the full those distinctions which, by the vulgar, are not so much as suspected.  Admitted to equal converse with men and women who represented the best in English society, he could cast away the evil grudge, the fierce spirit of self-assertion, and be what nature had proposed in endowing him with large brain, generous blood, delicate tissues.  What room for malignancy?  He was accepted by his peers, and could regard with tolerance even those ignoble orders of mankind amid whom he had so long dwelt unrecognised.

A bee hummed past him, and this sound—­of all the voices of nature that which most intenerates—­filled his heart to overflowing.  Moisture made his eyes dim, and at the impulse of a feeling of gratitude, such as only the subtlest care of psychology could fully have explained, he turned to Buckland, saying: 

’But for my meeting with you I should have had a lonely and not very cheerful holiday.  I owe you a great deal.’

Warricombe laughed, but as an Englishman does when he wishes to avoid show of emotion.