e noise of
starting hoofs, of wheels, of the English crowd hurrahing as the chaise
rolled away. Her head almost touched M. Raoul's breast. Then she broke
loose, as her brother's step sounded in the passage.

CHAPTER VII

LOVE AND AN OLD MAID

I pray you be gentle with Dorothea. Find, if you can, something
admirable in this plain spinster keeping, at the age of thirty-seven,
a room in her breast adorned and ready for first love; find it pitiful,
if you must, that the blind boy should mistake his lodging; only do
not laugh, or your laughter may accuse you in the sequel.

She had a most simple heart. Wonder filled it as she rode home to
Bayfield, and by the bridge she reined up Mercury as if to take her
bearings in an unfamiliar country. At her feet rushed the Axe, swollen
by spring freshets; a bullfinch, wet from his bath, bobbed on the sand-
stone parapet, shook himself, and piped a note or two; away up the
stream, among the alders, birds were chasing and courting; from above
the Bayfield elms, out of spaces of blue, the larks' song fell like a
din of innumerable silver hammers. Either new sense had been given her,
or the rains had washed the landscape and restored obliterated lines,
colours, meanings. The very leaves by the roadside were fragrant as
flowers.

For the moment it sufficed to know that she was loved, and that she
loved. She was no fool. At the back of all her wonder lay the certainty
that in the world's eyes such love as hers was absurd; that it must end
where it began; that Raoul could never be hers, nor she escape from a
captivity as real as his. But, perhaps because she knew all this so
certainly, she could put it aside. This thing had come to her: this
happiness to which, alone, in darkness, depressed by every look into
the mirror, by every casual proof that her brothers and intimates
accepted the verdict as final, her soul had been loyal--a forgotten
servant of a neglectful lord. In the silence of her own room, in her
garden, in the quiet stir of household duties, and again during the
long evenings while she sat knitting by the fire and her brothers
talked, she had pondered much upon love and puzzled herself with many
questions. She had watched girls and their lovers, wives and their
husbands. Can love (she had asked) draw near and pass and go its way
unrecognised? She had conned the signs. Now the hour had come, and she
had needed none of her learning--eyes, hands, and voice, she had
kn