Years passed before he drew nigh to the knowledge of what he sought.
For weeks the mood broken by the voice of his companion did not return, though the forms of Nature were henceforth full of a pleasure he had never known before.

He loved the grass; the water was more gracious to him; he would leave his bed early, that he might gaze on the clouds of the east, with their borders gold-blasted with sunrise; he would linger in the fields that the amber and purple, and green and red, of the sunset, might not escape after the sun unseen.

And as long as he felt the mystery, the revelation of the mystery lay before and not behind him.
And Shargar--had he any soul for such things?
Doubtless; but how could he be other than lives behind Robert?
For the latter had ancestors--that is, he came of people with a mental and spiritual history; while the former had been born the birth of an animal; of a noble sire, whose family had for generations filled the earth with fire, famine, slaughter, and licentiousness; and of a wandering outcast mother, who blindly loved the fields and woods, but retained her affection for her offspring scarcely beyond the period while she suckled them.

The love of freedom and of wild animals that she had given him, however, was far more precious than any share his male ancestor had borne in his mental constitution.

After his fashion he as well as Robert enjoyed the sun and the wind and the water and the sky; but he had sympathies with the salmon and the rooks and the wild rabbits even stronger than those of Robert..