Page:Confidence (London, Macmillan & Co., 1921).djvu/183

 cliff, and found himself on the level downs. Here there was apparently no obstacle whatever to his walking as far as his fancy should carry him. The summer was still in a splendid mood, and the hot and quiet day—it was a Sunday—seemed to constitute a deep silent smile on the face of nature. The sea glistened on one side, and the crops ripened on the other; the larks, losing themselves in the dense sunshine, made it ring here and there in undiscoverable spots; this was the only sound save when Bernard, pausing now and then in his walk, found himself hearing far below him, at the base of the cliff, the drawling murmur of a wave. He walked a great many miles, and passed through half a dozen of those rude fishing-hamlets, lodged in some sloping hollow of the cliff, so many of which, of late years, all along the Norman coast, have adorned themselves with a pair of hotels and a row of bathing-machines. He walked so far that the shadows had begun to lengthen before he bethought himself of stopping; the afternoon had come on and had already begun to wane. The grassy downs still stretched before him, shaded here and there with shallow but windless dells. He looked for the softest place, and then flung himself down on the grass. He lay there for a long time, thinking of many things. He had determined to give himself up to a day's happiness; it was happiness of a very harmless kind—the satisfaction of thought, the bliss of mere consciousness; but such as it was, it did not elude him nor turn bitter in his heart, and the long summer day closed upon him before his spirit, hovering in perpetual circles round the idea of what might be, had begun to rest its wing. When he rose to his feet again it was too late to return to Blanquais in the same way that he had come; the evening was at hand, the light was already fading, and the walk he had 175