Poor little man.
Lucia was so happy herself that she wanted Mr. Rickman to be happy
too.
CHAPTER XXI
Mr. Rickman was anything but happy as he set out for his walk that
glorious April morning.
Outside the gate of Court House he stood and looked about him,
uncertain of the way he would go. All ways were open to him, and
finally, avoiding the high road, he climbed up a steep and stony lane
to the great eastern rampart which is Harcombe Hill. Beneath him lay
Harmouth, at the red mouth of the valley where the river Hare trickles
into the sea through a barrier of shingle. Two gigantic and flaming
cliffs dwarf the little town to the proportions of a hamlet. In any
other situation Harmouth might have preserved its elegant Regency air,
but sprawling on the beach and scattered on the hillsides it has a
haphazard appearance, as if it had been dropped there when those two
huge arms of the upland stretched out and opened to the sea.
But Nature on the whole has been kind to Harmouth, though the first
thing that strikes the stranger in that place is her amazing and
apparently capricious versatility. Nature, round about Harmouth, is
never in the same mood for a mile together. The cliffs change their
form and colour with every dip in the way; now they are red like
blood, and now a soft and powdery pink with violet shadows in their
seams. Inland, it is a medley of fields and orchards, beech-woods,
pine-woods, dark moorland and sallow down, cut by the deep warm lanes
where hardly a leaf stirs on a windy day.
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