ss-knoll, a
little beyond the farm-yard, from which she could see green corn-tracts
and the pastures by the river, the river flowing oily under summer
light, and the slow-footed cows, with their heads bent to the herbage;
far-away sheep, and white hawthorn bushes, and deep hedge-ways bursting
out of the trimness of the earlier season; and a nightingale sang among
the hazels near by.

This scene of unthrobbing peacefulness was beheld by Rhoda with her
first conscious delight in it. She gazed round on the farm, under a
quick new impulse of affection for her old home. And whose hand was
it that could alone sustain the working of the farm, and had done so,
without reward? Her eyes travelled up to Wrexby Hall, perfectly barren
of any feeling that she was to enter the place, aware only that it was
full of pain for her. She accused herself, but could not accept the
charge of her having ever hoped for transforming events that should
twist and throw the dear old farm-life long back into the fields of
memory. Nor could she understand the reason of her continued coolness
to Robert. Enough of accurate reflection was given her to perceive that
discontent with her station was the original cause of her discontent
now. What she had sown she was reaping:--and wretchedly colourless are
these harvests of our dream! The sun has not shone on them. They may
have a tragic blood-hue, as with Dahlia's; but they will never have
any warm, and fresh, and nourishing sweetness--the juice which is in a
single blade of grass.

A longing came upon Rhoda to go and handle butter. She wished to smell
it as Mrs. Sumfit drubbed and patted and flattened and rounded it in the
dairy; and she ran down the slope, meeting her father at the gate. He
was dressed in his brushed suit, going she knew whither, and when he
asked if she had seen her uncle, she gave for answer a plain negative,
and longed more keenly to be at work with her hands, and to smell the
homely creamy air under the dairy-shed.

CHAPTER XLIV

She watched her father as he went across the field and into the lane.
Her breathing was suppressed till he appeared in view at different
points, more and more distant, and then she sighed heavily, stopped her
breathing, and hoped her unshaped hope again. The last time he was in
sight, she found herself calling to him with a voice like that of a
burdened sleeper: her thought being, "How can you act so cruelly to
Robert!" He passed up Wrexby Heath, a