a great cawing and crowing of the cock-birds while they flew
about and fed their mates. The leaves were not out; their buds only
looked like green eggs spotting the trees, excepting that here and there
a horse-chestnut, forwarder than its brethren, was pushing its crumpled
foliage out of the pale-pink sheath. Everywhere saplings had been cut
down, and numbers of them strewed the damp mossy ground; but light
penetrated, and water trinkled, there was a pleasant scent of herbs and
flowers, and the whole place was cheerful with growth and spring.

A set of winding steps cut in the soft, red rock led into the glen just
where the side was steepest, and Brandon, intent on discovery, sprang
lightly down them. He wandered almost everywhere about the place. It
seemed to hold within itself a different climate from the world above,
where keen spring air was stirring; here hardly a breath moved, and in
the soft sheltered warmth the leaves appeared visibly to be expanding.
He forgot his object, also another object that he had in view (the
business, in fact, which had brought him), leaned against the trunk of a
horse-chestnut, listened to the missel-thrushes, looked at a pine-tree a
little way off, that was letting down a mist of golden dust, and
presently lost himself in a reverie, finding, as is the way with a
lover, that the scene present, whatever it may happen to be, was helping
to master his everyday self, was indeed just the scene to send him
plunging yet further down into the depths of his passionate dream.

He had stood leaning against the tree, with his hat at his feet and his
arms folded, for perhaps half an hour. He had inherited a world (with an
ideal companion), had become absorbed into a lifetime of hope; and his
love appeared to grow without let or hindrance in the growing freshness
and glorious expansion of the spring.

Half an hour of hope and joy consoles for much foregone trouble, and
further satisfies the heart by making it an easier thing to believe in
more yet to come.

A sudden exclamation and a little crash roused him.

Laura! She had come to visit her favourite tree, and lo! a man there at
last, leaning against it lost in thought, and so absolutely still that
she had not noticed him.

She knew in an instant that this was not Joseph, and yet as the sight of
him flashed on her sense before recognition, the nothingness she always
found gave way to a feeling as of something real, that almost might have
been