If he
could, he would have shrunk from this office; but all the more because
he specially had to do with the mystical side of medicine, he always
tried to keep his relation to her free from personal feeling, and his
aim single and matter-of-fact.
It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the very
topographical and meteorological environment. The autumn was a long
delight in which the constant sea, the constant sky, knew almost as
little variance as the unchanging Alps. The days passed in a procession
of sunny splendor, neither hot nor cold, nor of the temper of any
determinate season, unless it were an abiding spring-time. The flowers
bloomed, and the grass kept green in a reverie of May. But one afternoon
of January, while Lanfear was going about in a thin coat and panama hat,
a soft, fresh wind began to blow from the east. It increased till
sunset, and then fell. In the morning he looked out on a world in which
the spring had stiffened overnight into winter. A thick frost painted
the leaves and flowers; icicles hung from pipes and vents; the frozen
streams flashed back from their arrested flow the sun as it shone from
the cold heaven, and blighted and blackened the hedges of geranium and
rose, the borders of heliotrope, the fields of pinks.
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