Some hours after parting with my father in London, I lay down to sleep in
my old home, feeling as if I had thrown off a coat of armour. I awoke
with a sailor's song on my lips. Looking out of window at the well-known
features of the heaths and dark firs, and waning oak copses, and the
shadowy line of the downs stretching their long whale backs South to
West, it struck me that I had been barely alive of late. Indeed one who
consents to live as I had done, in a hope and a retrospect, will find his
life slipping between the two, like the ships under the striding
Colossus. I shook myself, braced myself, and saluted every one at the
breakfast table with the frankness of Harry Richmond. Congratulated on
my splendid spirits, I was confirmed in the idea that I enjoyed them,
though I knew of something hollow which sent an echo through me at
intervals. Janet had become a fixed inmate of the house. 'I've bought
her, and I shall keep her; she's the apple of my eye,' said the squire,
adding with characteristic scrupulousness, 'if apple's female.' I asked
her whether she had heard from Temple latterly. 'No; dear little
fellow!' cried she, and I saw in a twinkling what it was that the squire
liked in her, and liked it too. I caught sight of myself, as through a
rift of cloud, trotting home from the hunt to a glad, frank, unpretending
mate, with just enough of understanding to look up to mine. For a second
or so it was pleasing, as a glance out of his library across hill and
dale will be to a strained student. Our familiarity sanctioned a comment
on the growth of her daughter-of-the-regiment moustache, the faintest
conceivable suggestion of a shadow on her soft upper lip, which a poet
might have feigned to have fallen from her dark thick eyebrows.

'Why, you don't mean to say, Hal, it's not to your taste?' said the
squire.