t the shadow of the fir woods now. The carriage crossed the
white-railed culvert--bridging the little stream that takes its rise
amid the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bog, and meanders down the
valley--and entered the oak plantation just inside the park gate.
Russet leaves in rustling, hurrying companies, fled up and away from
the rapidly turning wheels and quick horse hoofs. The sunshine was wan
and chill as the smile on a dead face. Lines of pale, lilac
cloud--shaped like those flights of cranes which decorate the oriental
cabinets of the Long Gallery--crossed the western sky above the bare
balsam poplars, the cluster of ancient half-timbered cottages at the
entrance to Sandyfield church lane, and the rise of the gray-brown
fallow beyond, where sheep moved, bleating plaintively, within a
wattled fold.

The scene, altogether familiar though it was, impressed itself on
Richard's mind just now, as one of paralysing melancholy. God help us,
what a stricken, famished world it is! Will you not always find sorrow
and misfortune seated at the root of things if, disregarding overlaying
prettiness of summer days, of green leaf and gay blossom, you dare draw
near, dig deep, look close? And can nothing, no one, escape the
blighting touch of that canker stationed at the very foundations of
being? Certainly it would seem not--Richard reasoned--listening to the
words of the radiant woman beside him, ordained, in right of her talent
and puissant grace, to be a queen and idol of men. For sadder than the
thin sunshine, bare trees and complaint of the hungry flock, was that
assured declaration that loveless and unlovely marriages--of which her
own was one--exist by the thousand, are, indeed, the veriest
commonplace!

These reflections held Richard, since he had been thinker and poet--in
his degree--since childhood; lover only during the brief space of these
last ten surprising days. Thus the general application claimed his
attention first. But hard on the heels of this followed the personal
application. For, as is the way of all true lovers, the universality of
the law under which it takes its rise mitigates, by most uncommonly
little, either the joy or sorrow of the particular case. Poignant
regret that she suffered, strong admiration that she bore suffering so
adherent with such lightness of demeanour--then, more dangerous than
these, a sense of added unlooked-for nearness to her, and a resultant
calling not merely of the spi