Phoebe’s conversation with her father occupied a space of time extending over just two minutes.  He met her eager eyes with a smile, patted her head, pinched her ear, and by his manner awakened a delicious flutter of hope in the girl before he spoke.  When, therefore, Phoebe learned that Will was sent about his business for ever, and must henceforth be wholly dismissed from her mind, the shock and disappointment of such intelligence came as a cruel blow.  She stood silent and thunderstruck before Miller Lyddon, a world of reproaches in her frightened eyes; then mutely the corners of her little mouth sank as she turned away and departed with her first great sorrow.

Phoebe’s earliest frantic thought had been to fly to Will, but she knew such a thing was impossible.  There would surely be a letter from him on the following morning hidden within their secret pillar-box between two bricks of the mill wall.  For that she must wait, and even in her misery she was glad that with Will, not herself, lay decision as to future action.  She had expected some delay; she had believed that her father would impose stern restrictions of time and make a variety of conditions with her sweetheart; she had even hoped that Miller Lyddon might command lengthened patience for the sake of her headstrong, erratic Will’s temper and character; but that he was to be banished in this crushing and summary fashion overwhelmed Phoebe, and that utterly.  Her nature, however, was not one nourished from any very deep wells of character.  She belonged to a class who suffer bitterly enough under sorrow, but the storm of it while tearing like a tropical tornado over heart and soul, leaves no traces that lapse of time cannot wholly and speedily obliterate.  On them it may be said that fortune’s sharpest strokes inflict no lasting scars; their dispositions are happily powerless to harbour the sustained agony that burrows and gnaws, poisons man’s estimate of all human affairs, wrecks the stores of his experience, and stamps the cicatrix of a live, burning grief on brow and brain for ever.  They find their own misery sufficiently exalted; but their temperament is unable to sustain a lifelong tribulation or elevate sorrow into tragedy.  And their state is the more blessed.  So Phoebe watered her couch with tears, prayed to God to hear her solemn promises of eternal fidelity, then slept and passed into a brief dreamland beyond sorrow’s reach.

Meantime young Blanchard took his stormy heart into a night of stars.  The moon had risen; the sky was clear; the silvery silence remained unbroken save for the sound of the river, where it flowed under the shadows of great trees and beneath aerial bridges and banners of the meadow mists.  Will strode through this scene, past his mother’s cottage, and up a hill behind it, into the village.  His mind presented in turn a dozen courses of action, and each was built upon the abiding foundation of Phoebe’s sure faithfulness.  That she would cling to him for