CHAPTER XLIII
CLOUDS OVER THE SEA
The high, partridge-coloured heathland rolls southward, with small ridges as of a sea broken by cross winds, or as if the heather and the hard gorse cushions had grown over ruins which time had not yet smoothed into the right curves of perfect death. A gentle wind changes the grass from silver to green, from green to silver, by depressing or lifting up the blades. In the dry heather and pallid herbage the wind sounds all the stops of despair. The note that each produces is faint, and the combination hardly louder than the sound that fancy makes among the tombs. Nevertheless, the enchantment of that little noise pours into the air and heart a sympathy with the thousand microscopic sorrows and uncertainties of the inanimate world—a feeling that is part of the melancholy importunately intruding on a day of early spring. The larks rise, linking earth and sky with their songs, and the stonechats are restless.
There are no trees. The only house is a little, white, thatched cottage among some shining dark boats, on the distant rosy shore.
The sea makes no sound. It changes with the sky so often and so subtly that its variations are to be described, if at all, in terms not of colour but of thought. All such
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