“By gad, what a glorious night!” sighed Guy, staring out at the orchard. “We’ll take a walk, shall we?”
They went through the orchard where the pears and pippins were lustered by the sheen and glister of the moon. They walked on over grass that sobbed in the dewfall beneath their footsteps. They faded from the world into a web of mist when trees rose suddenly like giants before them and in the depths of whose white glooms on either side they could hear the ceaseless munching of bullocks at nocturnal pasturage. Then in a moment they had left the mist behind them and stood in the heart of the valley, watching for a while the willows jet black against the moon, and the gleaming water at their base.
“I wish you were going to be up next term,” said Michael. “I really can hardly bear to think of you here. You are a lucky devil.”
“Why don’t you come and join me?” Guy suggested,
“I wish I could. Perhaps I will after next year. And yet what should I do? I’ve dreamed enough. I must decide what I’m going to _try_ to do, at any rate. You see, I’m not a poet. Guy, you ought to start a sort of lay monastery—a house for people to retreat into for the purpose of meditation upon their careers.”
“As a matter of fact, it would be a jolly good thing if some people did do that.”
“I don’t know,” said Michael. “I should get caught in the web of the meditation. I should hear the world as just now we heard those bullocks. Guy, Wychford is a place of dreams. You’ll find that. You’ll live on and on at Plashers Mead until everything about you turns into the sort of radiant unreality we’ve seen to-night.”
The church-clock with raucous whizz and clangor sounded ten strokes.
“And time,” Michael went on, “will come to mean no more than a brief disturbance of sound. Really I’m under the enchantment already. I’m beginning to wonder if life really does hold a single problem that could not be dissolved at once by this powerful moonshine.”
Next day Michael said he must go back to London to-morrow since he feared that if he dallied he would never go back. Guy could not dissuade him from his resolve.
“I don’t want to spoil my picture of you in this valley,” Michael explained. “You know, I feel inclined to put Plashers Mead into the farthest recesses of my heart, so that whatever happens when I go down next year, it will be so securely hidden that I shall have the mere thought of it for a refuge.”