ness of his hour with Nelly, after the
bustle of the week, the arrivals and departures, the endless business,
of a great hospital:--he was conscious of them all, intensely conscious,
as parts of a single, delightful whole to which he had looked forward
for days. And yet he was restless and far from happy. He wandered about
the mountain roads for a long time--watching the moon as it rose above
the sharp steep of Loughrigg and sent long streamers of light down the
Elterwater valley, and up the great knees of the Pikes. The owls hooted
in the oak-woods, and the sound of water--the Brathay rushing over the
Skelwith rocks, and all the little becks in fell and field, near and
far--murmured through the night air, and made earth-music to the fells.
Farrell had much of the poet in him; and the mountains and their life
were dear to him. But he was rapidly passing into the stage when a man
over-mastered by his personal desires is no longer open to the soothing
of nature. He had recently had a long and confidential talk with his
lawyer at Carlisle, who was also his friend, and had informed himself
minutely about the state of the law. Seven years!--unless, of her own
free will, she took the infinitesimal risk of marriage before the period
was up.

But he despaired of her doing any such thing. He recognised fully that
the intimacy she allowed him, her sweet openness and confidingness, were
all conditioned by what she regarded as the fixed points in her life; by
her widowhood, legal and spiritual, and by her tacit reliance on his
recognition of the fact that she was set apart, bound as other widows
were not bound, protected by the very mystery of Sarratt's fate, from
any thought of re-marriage.

And he!--all the time the strength of a man's maturest passion was
mounting in his veins. And with it a foreboding--coming he knew not
whence--like the sudden shadow that, as he looked, blotted out the
moonlight on the shining bends and loops of the Brathay, where it
wandered through the Elterwater fields.

CHAPTER XII

Bridget Cookson slowly signed her name to the letter she had been
writing in the drawing-room of the boarding-house where she was
accustomed to stay during her visits to town. Then she read the letter
through--

'I can't get back till the middle or end of next week at least. There's
been a great deal to do, of one kind or another. And I'm going down to
Woking to-morrow to spend the week-end with a girl I met here