Clementina by A.E.W. Mason

Wogan went from the parlour and climbed out of the house by the rope-ladder. He left it hanging at the window and walked up the glimmering road, a ribbon of ghostly white between dim hills. It was then about half-past twelve of the night, and not a feather of cloud stained the perfection of the sky. It curved above his head spangled like a fair lady's fan, and unfathomably blue like Clementina's eyes when her heart stirred in their depths. He reached the little footway and turned into the upward cleft of the hills. He walked now into the thick night of a close-grown clump of dwarf-oaks, which weaved so dense a thatch above his head that he knocked against the boles. The trees thinned, he crossed here and there a dimpled lawn in the pure starshine, he traversed a sparse grove of larches in the dreamy twilight, he came out again upon the grassy lip of a mountain torrent which henceforth kept him company, and which, speaking with many voices, seemed a friend trying to catch his mood.

For here it leaped over an edge of rock, and here in a tiny waterfall, and splashed into a pellucid pool, and the reverberating noise filled the dell with a majestic din; there it ran smoothly kissing its banks with a murmur of contentment, embosoming the stars; beyond, it chafed hoarsely between narrow walls; and again half a mile higher up it sang on shallows and evaded the stones with a tinkling laugh.