He soon found that he looked upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came near to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world—even in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and truly see it. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not always, any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth.

He had learned much since he went to the country. He had come nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of. And now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him. He remembered her and was glad.

Soon he began to find that, both as regards Nature and those we love, absence is, for very nearness, often better than presence itself. He had always thought of Nature as an abstraction. Now it gradually came to him, and gained upon him before he knew it, that the things about him wore meanings. Something was meaning them. Thoughts clothed in things were everywhere about him, over his head, under his feet, and in his heart. And as often as anything brought him pleasure, either through memory or in present vision, it brought Barbara too. With each new sense of loveliness, she floated up from where she lay, ever ready to rise, in the ocean of his heart.

He knew that Barbara did not make these things. It only seemed as if she made them because she was the better joy of them. But why should the thought of Barbara suggest a soul, that is, a causing, informing presence, to everything around him?

Was there a meaning in them? How did they come to have that meaning? If man and Nature both came out of nothing, why should they seem to have meaning? Or was he merely consenting to be fooled, acting as if there was meaning where he knew there was nothing, because of the joy it gave him to think of Barbara?

The truth of Richard’s love appeared in this that he was more able now to see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea from the side of one who thought differently.