over just two minutes. He met her eager eyes with a smile, patted her
head, pinched her ear, and by his manner awakened a delicious flutter of
hope in the girl before he spoke. When, therefore, Phoebe learned that
Will was sent about his business for ever, and must henceforth be wholly
dismissed from her mind, the shock and disappointment of such
intelligence came as a cruel blow. She stood silent and thunderstruck
before Miller Lyddon, a world of reproaches in her frightened eyes; then
mutely the corners of her little mouth 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.