more like a confiding little animal than a bird, with its friendly ways, and its power—shared with no other small bird—of meeting the human eye.
He had lived in some of the beauty spots of the world, but he said to himself that no beauty crept into the heart as this beauty of Sussex did. Mingled with it was some of the charm of what was lovable in human nature—the charm of gentleness and quiet and homeliness. Every wind was tempered, the sun shone through a protecting haze, the verdure harbored nothing more treacherous than a fluttering moth. To an eye accustomed to the white and blue glare of the South, every tint, every color seemed happily blended. And even the robins, he thought, returning to his book, seemed to know and like him.
Madame Claire was writing to Noel.
