Meanwhile Nelly was wandering through the May dusk along the lake.  She walked through flowers.  The scents of a rich earth were in the air; daylight lingered, but a full and golden moon hung over Loughrigg in the west; and the tranced water of the lake was marvellously giving back the beauty amid which it lay—­form, and colour, and distance—­and all the magic of the hour between day and night.  There was no boat, alack, to take her to the island; but there it lay, dreaming on the silver water, with a great hawthorn in full flower shewing white upon its rocky side.  She made her way to the point nearest to the island, and there sat down on a stone at the water’s edge.

Opposite to her was the spot where she and George had drifted with the water on their last night together.  If she shut her eyes she could see his sunburnt face, blanched by the moonlight, his strong shoulders, his hands—­which she had kissed—­lying on the oars.  And mingling with the vision was that other—­of a grey, dying face, a torn and broken body.

Her heart was full of intensest love and yearning; but the love was no longer a torment.  She knew now that if she had been able to tell George everything, he would never have condemned her; he would only have opened his arms and comforted her.

She was wrapped in a mystical sense of communion with him, as she sat dreaming there.  But in such a calm and exaltation of spirit, that there was ample room besides in her mind for the thought of William Farrell—­her friend.  Her most faithful and chivalrous friend!  She thought of Farrell’s altered aspect, of the signs of a great task laid upon him, straining even his broad back.  And then, of his loneliness.  Cicely was gone—­his ‘little friend’ was gone.

What could she still do for him?  It seemed to her that even while George stood spiritually beside her, in this scene of their love, he was bidding her think kindly and gratefully of the man whom he had blessed in dying—­the man who, in loving her, had meant him no harm.

Her mind formed no precise image of the future.  She was incapable, indeed, as yet, of forming any that would have disturbed that intimate life with George which was the present fruit in her of remorseful love and pity.  The spring shores of Rydal, the meadows steeping their flowery grasses in the water, the new leaf, the up-curling fern, breathed in her unconscious ear their message of re-birth.  But she knew only that she was uplifted, strengthened—­to endure and serve.