And is the feel of this earth how it feels to lie looking
up for ever at nothing? Is life anything but a nightmare, a dream;
and is not this the reality? And why my fury, my insignificant flame,
blowing here and there, when there is really no wind, only a shroud of
still air, and these flowers of sunlight that have been dropped on me!
Why not let my spirit sleep, instead of eating itself away with rage;
why not resign myself at once to wait for the substance, of which this
is but the shadow!"

And he lay scarcely breathing, looking up at the unmoving branches
setting with their darkness the pearls of the sky.

"Is not peace enough?" he thought. "Is not love enough? Can I not be
reconciled, like a woman? Is not that salvation, and happiness? What is
all the rest, but 'sound and fury, signifying nothing?"

And as though afraid to lose his hold of that thought, he got up and
hurried from the grove.

The whole wide landscape of field and wood, cut by the pale roads, was
glimmering under the afternoon sun, Here was no wild, wind-swept land,
gleaming red and purple, and guarded by the grey rocks; no home of the
winds, and the wild gods. It was all serene and silver-golden. In place
of the shrill wailing pipe of the hunting buzzard-hawks half lost up in
the wind, invisible larks were letting fall hymns to tranquillity;
and even the sea--no adventuring spirit sweeping the shore with its
wing--seemed to lie resting by the side of the land.

CHAPTER XV

When on the afternoon of that same day Miltoun did not come, all the
chilly doubts which his presence alone kept away, crowded thick and fast
into the mind of one only too prone to distrust her own happiness. It
could not last--how could it?

His nature and her own were so far apart! Even in that giving of herself
which had been such happiness, she had yet doubted; for there was so
much in him that was to her mysterious. All that he loved in poetry and
nature, had in it something craggy and culminating. The soft and
fiery, the subtle and harmonious, seemed to leave him cold. He had
no particular love for all those simple natural things, birds, bees,
animals, trees, and flowers, that seemed to her precious and divine.

Though it was not yet four o'clock she was already beginning to
droop like a flower that wants water. But she sat down to her piano,
resolutely, till tea came; playing on and on with a spirit only half
present, the other half of her wandering in the T