By-and-by sleep did come, and she was taken far away out of these miseries.  By the strange peculiarity of dreams that we so seldom dream about any grief that oppresses us at the time but generally of something quite different, she thought she was in some known unknown land, lovely and beautiful, with blue hills rising in the distance, and blue seas creeping and curling on to the shore.  On this shore she was walking with Robert Lyon, just as he used to be, with his true face and honest voice.  He did not talk to her much; but she felt him there, and knew they had but “one heart between them.”  A heart which had never once swerved, either from the other; a heart whole and sound, into which the least unfaith had never come—­that had never known, or recognized even as a possibility, the one first doubt, the ominous —­

    “Little rift within the lute,
    That by-and-by will make the music mute,
    And ever widening slowly silence all.”

Is it ever so in this world?  Does God ever bring the faithful man to the faithful woman, and make them love one another with a righteous, holy, persistent tenderness, which dare look in His face, nor be ashamed; which sees in this life only the beginning of the life to come; and in the closest, most passionate human love something to be held with a loose hand, something frail as glass and brittle as straw, unless it is perfected and sanctified by the love divine?

Hilary at least believed so.  And when at Elizabeth’s knock she woke with a start, and saw—­not the sweet sea-shore and Robert Lyon, but the dull parlor, and the last flicker of the fire, she thanked God that her dream was not all a dream—­that, sharp as her misery was, it did not touch this—­the love of her heart:  she believed in Robert Lyon still.

And so she rose and spoke quite cheerfully, asking Elizabeth how she had managed, and whether the advertisement would be sure to be in on Monday morning.

“Yes, Miss Hilary; it is sure to be all right.”

And then the girl hung about the room in an uneasy way, as if she had something to tell, which was the fact.

Elizabeth had had an adventure.  It was a new thing in her monotonous life; it brightened her eyes, and flushed her cheeks, and made her old nervousness of manner return.  More especially as she was somewhat perplexed, being divided in her mind between the wish she had to tell her mistress every thing, and the fear to trouble her, at this troublous time, with any small matter that merely concerned herself.

The matter was this.  When she had given in her advertisement at the Times office, and was standing behind the counter waiting for her change and receipt, there stood beside her a young man, also waiting.  She had hardly noticed him, till on his talking to the clerk about some misprint in his advertisement, apparently one of the great column of “Want Places,” her ear was caught by the unmistakable Stowbury accent.