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He could not, however, dead as the world seemed, remain a moment indoors after his work was done.  Whatever sort the weather, out he must go, often on the Thames, heedless of cold or wind or rain.  His mother grew anxious about him, attributed his unrest to despair, and feared she might have to tell him her secret.  She recoiled from setting free what she had kept in prison for so many years.  In her own mind she had settled his coming of age as the term of his humiliation, and she would gladly keep to it.  She shrunk from losing him, from breaking up the happiness that lay in seeing him about the house.  But that her husband had insisted on accustoming themselves to live without him, she would hardly have consented to his late absence.  She shrunk also from the measures necessary to reinstate him, and from the commotion those measures must occasion.  It was so much easier to go on as they were doing! and delay could not prejudice his right!  In fact, most of the things that made her take the baby, were present still, making her desire to keep the youth.  A day would come when she must part with him, but that day was not yet!  She dreaded uncaging her secret, because of the change it must work, whether immediate action were taken or not.  She never suspected that anyone knew or surmised it but herself, or that she had to beware of any tongue but her own.

Her husband left the matter entirely to her.  It was her business, he said, from the first, and he would let it be hers to the last.

CHAPTER XLI.

NATURE AND SUPERNATURE.

But Richard soon began to recover both from the separation and from his disappointment in regard to his letter.  He was satisfied that whatever might be the cause of her silence, it came from no fault in Barbara.  Nothing ever shook his faith in her.

And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn.  Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to comfort her child.  He had always delighted in the beauty of the world—­in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London.  The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street.  Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, be beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue.  The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not always, any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth.  But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of; and now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him:  he remembered her and was glad.