And meanwhile the widow’s dress had quite other meanings for Bridget.  She pondered long in the dark, till the supper bell rang.

At supper, her silence embarrassed and infected her companions, and Farrell, finding it impossible to get another tete-a-tete with Nelly, took his leave early.  He must be up almost with the dawn so as to get to Carton by nine o’clock.

* * * * *

Out of a stormy heaven the moon was breaking as he walked back to his cottage.  The solitude of the mountain ways, the freshness of the rain-washed air, and the sweetness of his hour with Nelly, after the bustle of the week, the arrivals and departures, the endless business, of a great hospital:—­he was conscious of them all, intensely conscious, as parts of a single, delightful whole to which he had looked forward for days.  And yet he was restless and far from happy.  He wandered about the mountain roads for a long time—­watching the moon as it rose above the sharp steep of Loughrigg and sent long streamers of light down the Elterwater valley, and up the great knees of the Pikes.  The owls hooted in the oak-woods, and the sound of water—­the Brathay rushing over the Skelwith rocks, and all the little becks in fell and field, near and far—­murmured through the night air, and made earth-music to the fells.  Farrell had much of the poet in him; and the mountains and their life were dear to him.  But he was rapidly passing into the stage when a man over-mastered by his personal desires is no longer open to the soothing of nature.  He had recently had a long and confidential talk with his lawyer at Carlisle, who was also his friend, and had informed himself minutely about the state of the law.  Seven years!—­unless, of her own free will, she took the infinitesimal risk of marriage before the period was up.

But he despaired of her doing any such thing.  He recognised fully that the intimacy she allowed him, her sweet openness and confidingness, were all conditioned by what she regarded as the fixed points in her life; by her widowhood, legal and spiritual, and by her tacit reliance on his recognition of the fact that she was set apart, bound as other widows were not bound, protected by the very mystery of Sarratt’s fate, from any thought of re-marriage.

And he!—­all the time the strength of a man’s maturest passion was mounting in his veins.  And with it a foreboding—­coming he knew not whence—­like the sudden shadow that, as he looked, blotted out the moonlight on the shining bends and loops of the Brathay, where it wandered through the Elterwater fields.

CHAPTER XII

Bridget Cookson slowly signed her name to the letter she had been writing in the drawing-room of the boarding-house where she was accustomed to stay during her visits to town.  Then she read the letter through—­

’I can’t get back till the middle or end of next week at least.  There’s been a great deal to do, of one kind or another.  And I’m going down to Woking to-morrow to spend the week-end with a girl I met here who’s knocked up in munition-work.  Don’t expect me till you see me.  But I daresay I shan’t be later than Friday.’