A little later in the morning you may meet a few gyps and bedmakers coming round chance corners, or descending mysterious stairs; but if you go beyond inhabited precincts, down to the river-side, you are almost sure to be quite alone; you may stand, as Christian was accustomed to do, on any one of the bridges which connect the college buildings and college grounds, and see nothing but the little robin hopping about and impressing tiny footprints after yours in the path, then flying on to the branches of the nearest willow, which, heavy with a weight that is not leaves, but snow, dips silently into the silenced water.

Or you may gaze, as Christian gazed every morning with continually new wonder, at the colors of the dawn brightening into sunrise, such as it looks on a winter’s morning—­so beautiful that it seems an almost equal marvel that nobody should care to see it but yourself, except perhaps a solitary gownsman, a reading man, taking his usual constitutional just as a matter of duty, but apparently not enjoying it the least in the world.

Not enjoying it—­the sharp fresh air, which braces every nerve, and invigorates every limb, causing all the senses to awake and share, as it were, this daily waking up of Nature, fresh as a rose?  For what rosiness, in the brightest summer days, can compare with that kiss of the winter’s sun on the tree-tops, slowly creeping down their trunks and branches?  And what blueness, even of a June sky, can equal that sea of space up aloft, across which, instead of shadows and stars, pink and lilac morning clouds are beginning to sail, clearer and brighter every minute?  As they have sailed for the last four centuries over the pinnacle of that wondrous chapel, which has been described in guide-books, and pictured in engravings to an overwhelming extent, yet is still a building of whose beauty, within and without, the eye never tires.

Christian stood watching it, for the hundredth time, with that vague sensation of pleasure which she felt at sight of all lovely things, whether of nature or art.  That, at least, had never left her; she hoped it never might.  It was something to hold by, though all the world slid by like a dream.  Very dreamy her life felt still, though she had tried to make it more real and natural by resuming some of her old ways, and especially her morning walk, before the nine o’clock breakfast at the Lodge.

She had made a faint protest in favor of an earlier hour than nine, and begged that the children might come down to breakfast; she craved so to have the little faces about the table.  But Miss Gascoigne had said solemnly that “my poor dear sister always breakfasted at nine, and never allowed her children to breakfast any where but in the nursery.”  And that reference, which was made many times a day, invariably silenced Christian.

She had now been married exactly four weeks, but it seemed like four years—­four ages—­as if she hardly remembered the time when she was Christian Oakley.  Yet now and then, in a dim sort of way, her old identity returned to her, as it does to those who, after a great crisis and uprooting of all life, submit, some in despair, some in humble, patience, to the inevitable.