Spring had come to the West Country, a joyous spring laden with soft airs and odours of distant flowering lands, and filling the hearts of men with a restless delight. It seemed impossible not to be happy, with a blue sky flecked by little clouds running down to meet a blue sea, the hedgerows gleaming with blackthorn, and the pink tips of the beeches shining in the sun. Children were out in the copses, picking primroses; farmers counted their lambs in the pasture, and down in the harbour sailor boys watched the rising tide and were all impatience to be aboard.
On the highest point of a headland to the west of the village of Garth a youth was sitting, staring out on the Channel. A jutting ledge of rock, with a tall boulder at its back, formed a natural chair of stone, and from it the green sward dipped steeply to the cliff. The boy's long, loosely set limbs, showing thin under the wrinkles of his knee breeches, sprawled restlessly across the rocky seat; the heels of his riding boots tore at the grass. In his fixed, seaward gaze there was nothing of the expectancy and hope that marked the faces of the youths in the harbour below. His eyes, that could be so merry, with gold lights dancing in the brown, were sad and dark under the black lashes, and his mouth, losing its shape of laughter, was set in hard lines.
