The grassy downs still stretched before him, shaded here and there with shallow but windless dells.

He looked for the softest place and then flung himself down on the grass; he lay there for a long time, thinking of many things.

He had determined to give himself up to a day's happiness; it was happiness of a very harmless kind--the satisfaction of thought, the bliss of mere consciousness; but such as it was it did not elude him nor turn bitter in his heart, and the long summer day closed upon him before his spirit, hovering in perpetual circles round the idea of what might be, had begun to rest its wing.

When he rose to his feet again it was too late to return to Blanquais in the same way that he had come; the evening was at hand, the light was already fading, and the walk he had taken was one which even if he had not felt very tired, he would have thought it imprudent to attempt to repeat in the darkness.

He made his way to the nearest village, where he was able to hire a rustic carriole, in which primitive conveyance, gaining the high-road, he jogged and jostled through the hours of the evening slowly back to his starting-point.