avengro and the reader are only
just beginning to realise the beauty and the value of the "bellissima,"
as the man in black calls her, when she is on the point of sinking
beneath our horizon, passing away like the brief music of an aubade.

Rapidly, much too rapidly, do we approach that summer dawn when Belle,
dressed neatly and plainly, her hair no longer plaited in Romany fashion
or floating in the wind, but secured by a comb, uncovered no longer, but
wearing a bonnet, her features very pale, allowed her cold hand to be
wrung--it was for the last time--by the unconscious Rye. The latter
ascended to the plain and thence looked down towards the dingle. "Isopel
Berners stood at the mouth, the beams of the early morning sun shone full
on her noble face and figure. I waved my hands towards her, she slowly
lifted up her right arm; I turned away, and never saw Isopel Berners
again."

Hardly less forlorn is the reader than the philologist when the latter
arrives back at the dingle, after a visit to the tavern two miles away,
to find that the tardily recognised treasure is lost to him for
ever,--resolved at length, too late, to give over teasing Belle by
pretending to teach her Armenian, determined, when the need is past, to
regularise his "uncertificated" relations with the glorious damozel, and
resigned, when concession is fruitless, to sink those objections to
America which Belle had disavowed, but which he had been proud to share
with disbanded soldiers, sextons, and excisemen. To this decision his
tortuous conferences with Jasper, and his frank soliloquy in the dingle,
had bent him fully forty-eight hours before Belle's ultimate departure,
unwilling though he was to incur the yoke of matrimony.

"I figured myself in America" (says he, in his reverie over the
charcoal fire), "in an immense forest, clearing the land destined by
my exertions to become a fruitful and smiling plain. Methought I
heard the crash of the huge trees as they fell beneath my axe; and
then I bethought me that a man was intended to marry--I ought to
marry; and if I married, where was I likely to be more happy as a
husband and a father, than in America, engaged in tilling the ground?
I fancied myself in America engaged in tilling the ground, assisted by
an enormous progeny--well, why not marry and go and till the ground in
America? I was young, and youth was the time to marry in and to
labour in; I had the use of