lane leading down from Raynham to Belthorpe. The pale eye of twilight
was shut. The wind had tossed up the bank of Western cloud, which was
now flying broad and unlighted across the sky, broad and balmy--the
charioted South-west at full charge behind his panting coursers. As he
neared the farm his heart fluttered and leapt up. He was sure she must
be there. She must have returned. Why should she have left for good
without writing? He caught suspicion by the throat, making it voiceless,
if it lived: he silenced reason. Her not writing was now a proof that
she had returned. He listened to nothing but his imperious passion, and
murmured sweet words for her, as if she were by: tender cherishing
epithet's of love in the nest. She was there--she moved somewhere about
like a silver flame in the dear old house, doing her sweet household
duties. His blood began to sing: O happy those within, to see her, and
be about her! By some extraordinary process he contrived to cast a sort
of glory round the burly person of Farmer Blaize himself. And oh! to
have companionship with a seraph one must know a seraph's bliss, and was
not young Tom to be envied? The smell of late clematis brought on the
wind enwrapped him, and went to his brain, and threw a light over the old
red-brick house, for he remembered where it grew, and the winter rose-
tree, and the jessamine, and the passion-flower: the garden in front with
the standard roses tended by her hands; the long wall to the left striped
by the branches of the cherry, the peep of a further garden through the
wall, and then the orchard, and the fields beyond--the happy circle of
her dwelling! it flashed before his eyes while he looked on the darkness.
And yet it was the reverse of hope which kindled this light and inspired
the momentary calm he experienced: it was despair exaggerating delusion,
wilfully building up on a groundless basis. "For the tenacity of true
passion is terrible," says The Pilgrim's Scrip: "it will stand against
the hosts of heaven, God's great array of Facts, rather than surrender
its aim, and must be crushed before it will succumb--sent to the lowest