past days.

The girl was not herself; there was visible in her not only that general
softening and deepening of character which had been the consequence
of her trouble in the spring, but a painful _ennui_ she could hardly
disguise, a longing for she knew not what. She was beginning to take the
homage paid to her gift and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was
in no sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision,
curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when
she came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long walks,
breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to their austerest
solitudes alone, as though haunted by that profound saying of Obermann,
'Man, is not made for enjoyment only--_la tristesse fait aussi partie de
ses vastes besoins_.'

What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonely moments, especially
in those moments among the high fells, beside some little tarn or
streamlet, while the sheets of swept by her, or the great clouds dappled
the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of Langham--of
that first thrill of passion which had passed through her, delusive and
abortive, like one of those first thrills of spring which bring out
the buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her again,
'a moral east; wind was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought
of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her
heartstrings. But was it really 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 Fill, '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