autumn evenings were beginning to be chilly. It was one o'clock
before they thought of going to bed on that memorable night.



CHAPTER IV.



The vehemence with which Susan Dixon threw herself into occupation
could not last for ever. Times of languor and remembrance would
come--times when she recurred with a passionate yearning to bygone
days, the recollection of which was so vivid and delicious, that it
seemed as though it were the reality, and the present bleak bareness
the dream. She smiled anew at the magical sweetness of some touch or
tone which in memory she felt and heard, and drank the delicious cup
of poison, although at the very time she knew what the consequences
of racking pain would be.

"This time, last year," thought she, "we went nutting together--this
very day last year; just such a day as to-day. Purple and gold were
the lights on the hills; the leaves were just turning brown; here and
there on the sunny slopes the stubble-fields looked tawny; down in a
cleft of yon purple slate-rock the beck fell like a silver glancing
thread; all just as it is to-day. And he climbed the slender,
swaying nut-trees, and bent the branches for me to gather; or made a
passage through the hazel copses, from time to time claiming a toll.
Who could have thought he loved me so little?--who?--who?"

Or, as the evening closed in, she would allow herself to imagine that