and finding herself
in her little bedroom at Craddock Dene? What was she thinking of? Dream?
_This_ was no dream, this bold, blue, dancing water, this living
sunshine, this salt and savour and movement and brilliancy!

The _other_ was the dream; it seemed to be drifting away already. The
picture of the village and the house and the meadows, and the low line
of the hills was recalled as through a veil; it would not stand up and
face the emphatic present. At the end of a few months, would there be
anything left of her connexion with the place where she had passed
six--seven years of her life? and such years! They had put scars on her
soul, as deep and ghastly as ever red-hot irons had marked on tortured
flesh. Perhaps it was because of this rabid agony undergone, that now
she seemed to have scarcely any clinging to her home,--for the present
at any rate. And she knew that she left only sorrow for conventional
disasters behind her. The joy of freedom and its intoxication drowned
every other feeling. It was sheer relief to be away, to stretch oneself
in mental liberty and leisure, to look round at earth and sky and the
hurrying crowds, in quiet enjoyment; to possess one's days, one's
existence for the first time, in all these long years! It was as the
home-coming of a dispossessed heir. This freedom did not strike her as
strange, but as obvious, as familiar. It was the first condition of a
life that was worth living. And yet never before had she known it.
Ernest and Fred and even Austin had enjoyed it from boyhood, and in far
greater completeness than she could ever hope to possess it, even now.

Yet even this limited, this comparative freedom, which a man could
afford to smile at, was intoxicating. Heavens! under what a leaden cloud
of little obligations and restraints, and loneliness and pain, she had
been living! And for what purpose? To make obeisance to a phantom
public, not because she cared one iota for the phantom or its opinions,
but because husband and parents and relations were terrified at the
prospect of a few critical and disapproving remarks, that they would not
even hear! How mad it all was! It was not true feeling, not affection,
that prompted Hubert's opposition; it was not care for his real
happiness that inspired Henriette with such ardour in this cause; they
would both be infinitely happier and more harmonious in Hadria's
absence. The whole source of their distress was the fear of what people
would sa