But no one came.  The signal was given for departure.  The train glided out.  Diana’s head slipped back and her eyes closed.  Muriel, stifling her tears, dared not approach her.

* * * * *

Northward and eastward from Dover Harbor, sweep beyond sweep, rose the white cliffs that are to the arriving and departing Englishman the symbols of his country.

Diana, on deck, wrapped in veil and cloak, watched them disappear, in mists already touched by the moonrise.  Six months before she had seen them for the first time, had fed her eyes upon the “dear, dear land,” as cliffs and fields and houses flashed upon the sight, yearning toward it with the passion of a daughter and an exile.

In those six months she had lived out the first chapter of her youth.  She stood between two shores of life, like the vessel from which she gazed; vanishing lights and shapes behind her; darkness in front.

     “Where lies the land to which the ship must go? 
     Far, far ahead is all the seamen know!”

Part III

     “Love’s eye is not so true as all men’s:  no,
     How can it?  O how can Love’s eye be true
     That is so vexed with watching and with tears?”

CHAPTER XV

London was in full season.  But it was a cold May, and both the town and its inhabitants wore a gray and pinched aspect.  Under the east wind an unsavory dust blew along Piccadilly; the ladies were still in furs; the trees were venturing out reluctantly, showing many a young leaf bitten by night frosts; the Park had but a scanty crowd; and the drapers, oppressed with summer goods, saw their muslins and gauzes in the windows give up their freshness for naught.

Nevertheless, the ferment of political and social life had seldom been greater.  A Royal wedding in the near future was supposed to account for the vigor of London’s social pulse; the streets, indeed, were already putting up poles and decorations.  And a general election, expected in the autumn, if not before, accounted for the vivacity of the clubs, the heat of the newspapers, and the energy of the House of Commons, where all-night sittings were lightly risked by the Government and recklessly challenged by the Opposition.  Everybody was playing to the gallery—­i.e., the country.  Old members were wooing their constituencies afresh; young candidates were spending feverish energies on new hazards, and anxiously inquiring at what particular date in the campaign tea-parties became unlawful.  Great issues were at stake; for old parties were breaking up under the pressure of new interests and passions; within the Liberal party the bubbling of new faiths was at its crudest and hottest; and those who stood by the slow and safe ripening of Freedom, from “precedent to precedent,” were in much anxiety as to what shape or shapes might ultimately emerge from a brew so strong and heady.  Which only means that now, as always, Whigs and Radicals were at odds; and the “unauthorized programme” of the day was sending its fiery cross through the towns and the industrial districts of the north.