Journalists were besieging his rooms. Embryo statesmen were telephoning
for appointments. Great men sent their secretaries to suggest a
meeting. And in the midst of it all he had disappeared. The truth as
to his sudden absence from town was unknown even to Dartrey. At the
very moment when his figure loomed large and triumphant upon one of the
great canvasses in history, he had simply slipped away, a disappearance
as dramatic as it was opportune. And all because he had a fancy to see
how spring sat upon the moors,--and because he had walked back to his
rooms by way of Charles Street and because he had met Lady Alice.
The last ascent was finished and below him lay the house and climbing
woods,--woods that crept into the bosom of the hills, the closely
growing trees tipped with tender greens melting into the softest of
indeterminate greys as the breeze rippled through their tops like
fingers across a harp. The darker line of moorland in the background,
scant as ever of herbiage, had yet lost its menacing bareness and seemed
touched with the faint colour of the earth beneath, almost pink in the
generous sunshine.
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