A man working at the hedge watched him as he turned away disappointed, and Richard tried to look as though he didn't care or was unconscious of dragon-flies burning swiftly through the air. The labourer saw the pretence and smiled, and Richard, not quite understanding the smile, was still lightly teased by it. The man was laughing at him! The man, truly, was not laughing at the boy, but at his own half-shaped thoughts on seeing the boy chasing and losing a fly; for he thought of himself as a boy and was conscious of looking a long way backwards—forty years away when lovely things tormented his eyes with their freedom and light. Had he spoken he could have said no more than "That minds me now." Richard's shadow was but a shadow falling upon a hidden nerve and waking it to brief sensitiveness.
Richard's shadow followed him through the thin wood, back towards Crispin's Pool, and before he reached it he stopped, and slid down at the foot of a beech. It was so pleasant to loll there, for in the softness of this early summer warmth he felt a kind of physical languor creeping over his frame, so that for a while it was better to be idle than active. But though he lay still, his head rubbing now and then against the stained trunk, his thoughts were busy enough; at first turning after the lost fly and then, as he looked up at the blue, following the limbs of the beech tree into the sky. How could a tree hold its arms so firm and still, when his own—stretched out level from his shoulders—became in a moment so heavy and tremulous? He dropped them and looked up again, and saw a sunbeam through the leaves gilding the pale green of a great member that sprang high into the blue—gold on the pale green. The unspoken word made him think of the Gold Coast and his father. The Gold Coast—sparkling gold on dull gold sands, gold sparkling under shallow waves, gold flowing down in almost imperceptible morsels with the river to the sea; the Gold Coast—muddy forests, and figures black as mud, shining like mud after rain, staggering down through forests under small heavy bales of gold. An alligator moving slowly made a swell in the river, and slowly heaved his bulk out of the river water—a score of tiny streams falling from his corrugated back, and gold dust sliding in them or caught between the horny channels, sparkling like golden frost in the sun. Golden frost—the gold of the tropics where the heat made everything faint, except these minute, hard particles of golden frost.
