The ripe hue of the red and dun kine
absorbed the evening sunlight, which the white-coated animals
returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant
elevation on which she stood.
The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly
beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it
was more cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the
rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear,
bracing, ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass
and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in
Blackmoor. Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over
beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink and vanish
unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life
shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with
pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the
water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.
Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or
the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes
upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with
the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she
bounded along against the soft south wind.
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