d bitterly. Struggling with those sobs, she grew
less and less unhappy--knowing that he could never again feel quite so
desolate, as before he tried to give her comfort. It was all a bad
dream, and they would soon wake from it! And they would be happy; as
happy as they had been before--before these last months! And she
whispered:

"Only a little while, Eusty!"

CHAPTER XXIX

Old Lady Harbinger dying in the early February of the following year, the
marriage of Barbara with her son was postponed till June.

Much of the wild sweetness of Spring still clung to the high moor borders
of Monkland on the early morning of the wedding day.

Barbara was already up and dressed for riding when her maid came to call
her; and noting Stacey's astonished eyes fix themselves on her boots, she
said:

"Well, Stacey?"

"It'll tire you."

"Nonsense; I'm not going to be hung."

Refusing the company of a groom, she made her way towards the stretch of
high moor where she had ridden with Courtier a year ago. Here over the
short, as yet unflowering, heather, there was a mile or more of level
galloping ground. She mounted steadily, and her spirit rode, as it were,
before her, longing to get up there among the peewits and curlew, to feel
the crisp, peaty earth slip away under her, and the wind drive in her
face, under that deep blue sky. Carried by this warm-blooded sweetheart
of hers, ready to jump out of his smooth hide with pleasure, snuffling
and sneezing in sheer joy, whose eye she could see straying round to
catch a glimpse of her intentions, from whose lips she could hear issuing
the sweet bitt-music, whose vagaries even seemed designed to startle from
her a closer embracing--she was filled with a sort of delicious
impatience with everything that was not this perfect communing with
vigour.

Reaching the top, she put him into a gallop. With the wind furiously
assailing her face and throat, every muscle crisped; and all her blood
tingling--this was a very ecstasy of motion!

She reined in at the cairn whence she and Courtier had looked down at the
herds of ponies. It was the merest memory now, vague and a little sweet,
like the remembrance of some exceptional Spring day, when trees seem to
flower before your eyes, and in sheer wantonness exhale a scent of
lemons. The ponies were there still, and in distance the shining sea.
She sat thinking of nothing, but how good it was to be alive. The
fullness and sweetness o