It must have been after dinner, for he was sitting, duskily indistinct,
against the light, with a voice coming out to him. The candles had not
been brought in, and the view one saw through the big plate glass window
behind him was very clear and splendid. Those little Wealden hills in
Surrey and Sussex assume at times, for all that by Swiss standards they
are the merest ridges of earth, the dignity and mystery of great
mountains. Now, the crests of Hindhead and Blackdown, purple black
against the level gold of the evening sky, might have been some
high-flung boundary chain. Nearer there gathered banks and pools of
luminous lavender-tinted mist out of which hills of pinewood rose like
islands out of the sea. The intervening spaces were magnified to
continental dimensions. And the closer lowlier things over which we
looked, the cottages below us, were grey and black and dim, pierced by a
few luminous orange windows and with a solitary street lamp shining like
a star; the village might have been nestling a mountain's height below
instead of a couple of hundred feet.