l) he could hear every soft modulation
of her voice--though, to be sure, it was not lovers' talk that passed
between them. "Mr. Moore, won't you have the rest of this soda-water?"
or, "Yes, one of those brown biscuits, thank you," or, "Please, Mr.
Moore, will you crush those bits of paper together and bury them in a
hole? Nothing is so horrid as to come upon traces of a pic-nic on a
hillside or along a river." Already those long days of constant
companionship seemed to be becoming remote. It was the black
night-journey between Inverness and Perth that had severed that shining
time from the dull and commonplace hours he had now entered
upon. He looked out of the window as the train thundered
along--Preston--Wigan--Warrington--everywhere squalor, hurry, and noise,
with a smoke-laden sky lowering over the sad and dismal country,
different, indeed, from that other world he knew of, with its crimson
slopes of heather, its laughing waters, its lonely solitudes in their
noonday hush, the fair azure of the heavens becoming paler and paler
towards the horizon until it touched the distant peaks and shoulders of
Assynt. "Muss aus dem Thal jetzt scheiden, wo alles Lust und Klang;" but
at least the memory of it would remain with him--a gracious possession.

The long afternoon wore on; Crewe, Stafford, Lichfield, Tamworth went
by, as things in a dream, for his thoughts were far away. Sometimes, it
is true, he would rebel against this morbid, restless, useless regret
that had got hold of him; and he would valiantly attack the newspapers,
of which he had an ample supply; but somehow or another the gray columns
would fade away, and in their place would come a picture of Strathaivron
Lodge, and the valley, and the river, and of an upturned face smiling a
last farewell to him as the wagonette rolled on. Was it really only
yesterday that he had seen her--talked with her--taken her hand? A
yesterday that seemed years away! A vision already growing pale.

Well, London came at last, and all the hurry and bustle of Euston
Station; and when he had got his things put on the top of a hansom, and
given his address to the driver, there was an end of dreams. No more
dreams were possible in this great vortex of a city into which he was
now plunged--a turbulent, bewildering, vast black hole it seemed, and
yet all afire with its blaze of windows and lamps. In Strathaivron the
night was a gentle thing--it came stealing over the landscape as soft as
sle