“Your sister and Treherne seem to suit one another remarkably well. I doubted once if they would.”
“So did I. It ought to be a warning to us against hasty judgments. Especially here.” Mischief prompted the latter suggestion, for Doctor Urquhart must have recollected, as well as I did, the last and only time he and I had walked across this moorland-road, when we had such a serious quarrel, and I was more passionate and rude to him than I ever was to anybody--out of my own family. I hope he has forgiven me. Yet he was a little wrong too.
“Yes, especially here,” he repeated, smiling--so I have no doubt he did remember.
Just then, Lisabel's laugh, and her husband's with it, rang distantly across the pool.
I said, I felt sure they were, and that it was a blessed thing to find, the older one grew, how very much of happiness there is in life.
“I do; but not in your sense exactly. Remember, Miss Theodora, people see life in a different aspect at twenty-five and at--”
“That I am forty? Which I am not quite, by the bye. No doubt it seems to you a most awful age.”
I said, it was perhaps for a woman, but for a man no more than the prime of life, with many years before him in which both to work and enjoy.
“Yes, for work is enjoyment, the only enjoyment that ever satisfies.”
He stood gazing across the moorland, _my_ moorland, which put on its best smile for us to-day. Ay, though the heather was brown, and the furze-bushes had lost their gold. But so long as there is free air, sunshine, and sky, the beauty never can vanish from my beloved moor. I wondered how anyone could look at it and not enjoy it; could stand here as we stood and not be satisfied.
Perhaps in some slight way I hinted this, at least, so far as concerned myself, to whom everything seemed so delicious, after this month of sorrow.
“Ah, yes, I understand,” said Doctor Urquhart, “and so it should be with me also. So it is, I trust. This is a lovely day, lovely to its very close, you see.”
For the sun was sinking westward, and the clouds robing themselves for one of those infinitely varied late autumn sunsets, of the glory of which no human eye can ever tire.
“You never saw a tropical sunset? I have, many. I wonder if I shall ever see another.” After a little hesitation, I asked if he thought it likely? Did he wish to go abroad again?