she, really this very Rose, who had
rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast? She felt a sort
of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She must surely be
a poor creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and have
left so little trace behind?

And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised to the blind
friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far afield. Little vignettes
of London would come and go on the inner retina; smiles and sighs would
follow one another.

'_How kind he was that time! how amusing this!_'

Or, '_How provoking he was that afternoon! how cold that evening!_'

Nothing else--the pronoun remained ambiguous.

'I want a friend!' she said to herself once as she was sitting far up in
the bosom of High Fell, 'I want a friend badly. Yet my lover deserts me,
and I send away my friend!'

One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the vicar, and Rose were wandering round
the churchyard together, enjoying a break of sunny weather after days of
rain. Mrs. Thornburgh's personal accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps
a little more defined, a little more emphatic even, than when we first
knew her. The vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle grayer, a trifle
more submissive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal contest of
life, he was getting clearly worsted as the years went on. But the
performance through which his wife was now taking him tried him
exceptionally, and she only kept him to it with difficulty. She had had
an attack of bronchitis in the spring, and was still somewhat
delicate--a fact which to his mind gave her an unfair advantage of him.
For she would make use of it to keep constantly before him ideas which
he disliked, and in which he considered she took a morbid and unbecoming
pleasure. The vicar was of opinion that when his latter end overtook him
he should meet it on the whole as courageously as other men. But he was
altogether averse to dwelling upon it, or the adjuncts of it,
beforehand. Mrs. Thornburgh, however, since her illness had awoke to
that inquisitive affectionate interest in these very adjuncts which
many women feel. And it was extremely disagreeable to the vicar.

At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the precise spots in
the little churchyard where it seemed to her it would be pleasant to
rest. There was one corner in particular which attracted her, and she
stood now looking at it with measuring eyes and dissatisfied mouth