“Thirty!” said he.  “It seems to me that length.  At least, I am immensely older.  But looking at you, I could think it less than three.  You have not changed.  You are absolutely unchanged.  I am bound to hope so.  I shall see you soon.  I have much to talk of, much to tell you.  I shall hasten to call on your father.  I have specially to speak with him.  I—­what happiness this is, Laetitia!  But I must not forget I have a mother.  Adieu; for some hours—­not for many!”

He pressed her hand again.  He was gone.

She dismissed the children to their homes.  Plucking primroses was hard labour now—­a dusty business.  She could have wished that her planet had not descended to earth, his presence agitated her so; but his enthusiastic patriotism was like a shower that, in the Spring season of the year, sweeps against the hard-binding East and melts the air and brings out new colours, makes life flow; and her thoughts recurred in wonderment to the behaviour of Constantia Durham.  That was Laetitia’s manner of taking up her weakness once more.  She could almost have reviled the woman who had given this beneficent magician, this pathetic exile, of the aristocratic sunburned visage and deeply scrutinizing eyes, cause for grief.  How deeply his eyes could read!  The starveling of patience awoke to the idea of a feast.  The sense of hunger came with it, and hope came, and patience fled.  She would have rejected hope to keep patience nigh her; but surely it can not always be Winter! said her reasoning blood, and we must excuse her as best we can if she was assured, by her restored warmth that Willoughby came in the order of the revolving seasons, marking a long Winter past.  He had specially to speak with her father, he had said.  What could that mean?  What, but—­She dared not phrase it or view it.

At their next meeting she was “Miss Dale”.

A week later he was closeted with her father.

Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogized Sir Willoughby as a landlord.  A new lease of the cottage was to be granted him on the old terms, he said.  Except that Sir Willoughby had congratulated him in the possession of an excellent daughter, their interview was one of landlord and tenant, it appeared; and Laetitia said, “So we shall not have to leave the cottage?” in a tone of satisfaction, while she quietly gave a wrench to the neck of the young hope in her breast.  At night her diary received the line:  “This day I was a fool.  To-morrow?”

To-morrow and many days afterwards there were dashes instead of words.

Patience travelled back to her sullenly.  As we must have some kind of food, and she had nothing else, she took to that and found it dryer than of yore.  It is a composing but a lean dietary.  The dead are patient, and we get a certain likeness to them in feeding on it unintermittingly overlong.  Her hollowed cheeks with the fallen leaf in them pleaded against herself to justify her idol for not looking