 The modern lover. The road was heavy with mud. It was labor to move along it. The old wide way forsaken and grown over with grass used not to be so bad. The farm traffic from Coney Gray must have cut it up. The young man crossed carefully again to the strip of grass on the other side. It was a dreary, out of doors track, saved only by low fragments of fence and occasional bushes from the desolation of the large spaces of arable and of grasslands on either side, where only the unopposed wind and the great clouds mattered. Were even the little grasses bent to one another indifferent of any traveler. The abandoned road used to seem clean and firm. Cyril Merchant stopped to look round and bring back old winters to the scene over the ribbed red land and the purple wood. The surface of the field seemed suddenly to lift and break. Something had startled the pee wits and the fallow flickered over with pink gleams of birds white-breasting the sunset. Then the plovers turned and were gone in the dusk behind. Darkness was issuing out of the earth and clinging to the trunks of the elms, which rose like weird statues lessening down the wayside. Merchant labored forwards, the earth sucking and smacking at his feet. In front, the Coney Gray farm was piled in shadow on the road. He came near to it and saw the turnips heaped in a fabulous heap up the side of the barn, a buttress that rose almost to the eaves and stretched out towards the cart ruts in the road. Also, the pale breasts of the turnips got the sunset and they were innumerable orange glimmers piled in the dusk. The two laborers who were pulping at the foot of the mound stood shadow-like to watch as he passed, breathing the sharp scent of turnips. It was all very wonderful and glamorous here in the old places that had seemed so ordinary. Three-quarters of the scarlet sun was settling among the branches of the elm in front, right ahead where he would come soon. But when he arrived at the brow where the hills swooped downwards, where the broad road ended suddenly, the sun had vanished from the space before him and the evening star was white where the night urged up against the retreating rose-colored billow of day. Merchant passed through the style and sat upon the remnant of the thorn tree on the brink of the valley. All the wide space before him was full of a mist of rose nearly to his feet. The large ponds were hidden, the farms, the fields, the far-off coal mine under the rosy outpouring of twilight. Between him and the spaces of Leicestershire and the hills of Derbyshire, between him and all the South country which he had fled was the splendid rose-red strand of sunset and the white star keeping guard. Here, on the lee shore of day, was only the purple showing of the woods and the great hedge below him and the roof of the farm below him with a film of smoke rising up. Unreal, like a dream which wastes a sleep with unrest, was the South and its hurrying to and fro. Here, on the further shore of the sunset with the flushed tide at his feet and the large star flashing with strange laughter, did he himself naked walk with lifted arms into the quiet flood of life. What was it he wanted, sought in the slowly elapsing tide of days? Two years he had been in the large city in the South. There, always his soul had moved among the faces that swayed on the thousand current in that node of tides, hovering and wheeling and flying low over the faces of the multitude like a seagull over the waters, stooping now and again and taking a fragment of life, a look, a contour, a movement to feed upon. Of many people, his friends, he had asked that they would kindle again the smoldering embers of their experience. He had blown the low fires gently with his breath and had leaned his face towards their glow and had breathed in the words that rose like fumes from the revived embers till he was sick with the strong drug of sufferings and ecstasies and sensations and the dreams that ensued. But most folk had choked out... Sample complete. Ready to continue?