sank as she turned away and
departed with her first great sorrow.

Phoebe's earliest frantic thought had been to fly to Will, but she knew
such a thing was impossible. There would surely be a letter from him on
the following morning hidden within their secret pillar-box between two
bricks of the mill wall. For that she must wait, and even in her misery
she was glad that with Will, not herself, lay decision as to future
action. She had expected some delay; she had believed that her father
would impose stern restrictions of time and make a variety of conditions
with her sweetheart; she had even hoped that Miller Lyddon might command
lengthened patience for the sake of her headstrong, erratic Will's
temper and character; but that he was to be banished in this crushing
and summary fashion overwhelmed Phoebe, and that utterly. Her nature,
however, was not one nourished from any very deep wells of character.
She belonged to a class who suffer bitterly enough under sorrow, but the
storm of it while tearing like a tropical tornado over heart and soul,
leaves no traces that lapse of time cannot wholly and speedily
obliterate. On them it may be said that fortune's sharpest strokes
inflict no lasting scars; their dispositions are happily powerless to
harbour the sustained agony that burrows and gnaws, poisons man's
estimate of all human affairs, wrecks the stores of his experience, and
stamps the cicatrix of a live, burning grief on brow and brain for ever.
They find their own misery sufficiently exalted; but their temperament
is unable to sustain a lifelong tribulation or elevate sorrow into
tragedy. And their state is the more blessed. So Phoebe watered her
couch with tears, prayed to God to hear her solemn promises of eternal
fidelity, then slept and passed into a brief dreamland beyond sorrow's
reach.

Meantime young Blanchard took his stormy heart into a night of stars.
The moon had risen; the sky was clear; the silvery silence remained
unbroken save for the sound of the river, where it flowed under the
shadows of great trees and beneath aerial bridges and banners of the
meadow mists. Will strode through this scene, past his mother's cottage,
and up a hill behind it, into the village. His mind presented in turn a
dozen courses of action, and each was built upon the abiding foundation
of Phoebe's sure faithfulness. That she would cling to him for ever the
young man knew right well; no thought of a rival, therefore, entered
i