and brain, and gave her the suspicious looking
blue paper which he held in his hand. It all passed in a moment of time
to her dazed yet excited consciousness. The early primrose which she had
gathered had not had time to droop in her grasp, though she crushed the
stalk unconsciously in her fingers, before the gates were closed again,
the sound of the departing wheels growing faint on the road, and she
herself standing like one paralyzed with that thing in her hand. A
subpoena!--what was a subpoena? She knew as little, perhaps less, than
the children in the parish school, who began to troop along the road in
their resounding clogs at their dinner hour. The sound of this awoke her
a little to a frightened sense that she had better put this document out
of sight, at least until she could manage to understand it. And then she
sped swiftly away past the pretty white house lying in the sunshine,
with all its doors and windows open, to the little wood behind, where it
would be possible to think and find out at her leisure what this was. It
was a small wood and a public path ran through it; but where the public
was so limited as at Lakeside this scarcely impaired the privacy of the
inhabitants, at least in the morning, when everybody in the parish was
at work. Elinor hurried past the house that her mother might not see
her, and climbed the woody hillock to a spot which was peculiarly her
own, and where a seat had been placed for her special use. It was a
little mount of vision from which she could look out, up and down, at
the long winding line of the lake cleaving the green slopes, and away to
the rugged and solemn peaks among which lay, in his mountain fastnesses,
Helvellyn, with his hoary brethren crowding round him. Elinor had
watched the changes of many a north-country day, full of endless
vicissitudes, of flying clouds and gleams of sunshine, from that seat,
and had hoped and tried to believe that nothing, save these vicissitudes
of nature, would ever again disturb her. Had she really believed that?
Her heart thumping against her breast, and the pulses of her brain
beating loud in her ears, answered "No." She had never believed it--she
had known, notwithstanding all her obstinacy, and indignant opposition
to all who warned her, that some day or other her home must be broken
up, and the storm burst upon her. But even such a conviction, desperately
fought against and resisted, is a very different matter from the awful
sense