As Elinor watched the grim messenger depart, she pressed her hands tightly over her breast to hide from the quick eye of the miser the violent agitation that convulsed her frame, as the recollection of former days flashed upon her too retentive memory.

“Surely, surely,” she thought, “he will never come.  He has been too deeply injured to attend to a verbal summons from his unnatural brother.”

Although strongly impressed that this would be the case, the desire of once more beholding the love of her youth, though forbidden to speak to him, or even to hear the sound of his voice, produced a state of feverish excitement in her mind which kept alive her fears, without totally annihilating hope.

The misty, grey dawn was slowly breaking along the distant hills, when Grenard Pike, mounted upon a cart-horse which he had borrowed for the occasion, leisurely paced down the broad avenue of oaks that led through the park to the high road.  Methodical in all his movements, though life and death depended upon his journey, for no earthly inducement but a handsome donation in money would Grenard Pike have condescended to quicken his pace.  This Elinor had it not in her power to bestow; and she calculated with impatience the many hours which must elapse before such a tardy messenger could reach Norgood Hall.  Noon was the earliest period within the range of possibility; yet the sound of the horse’s hoofs, striking against the frosty ground, still vibrated upon her ear when she took her station at the chamber window, to watch for the arrival of the man whose image a separation of nearly twenty years had not been able to obliterate from her heart.  Such is the weakness of human nature, that we suffer imagination to outspeed time, and compress into one little moment the hopes, the fears, the anticipations, and the events of years; but when the spoiler again overtakes us, we look back, and, forgetful of our former impatience to accelerate his pace, we are astonished at the rapidity of his flight.

Elinor thought that the long day would never come to a close; yet it was as dark and as short as a bleak, gloomy day in November could be.  Evening at length came, but brought no Algernon.  Mr. Moore had paid his visit, and was gone.  He expected nothing less than the death of his patient, after giving his consent to such an extraordinary event; and he had even condescended to take a draught and some pills from the doctor’s hands.  It is true that the sight of him, and the effects of the nauseous medicines he had administered, had put the miser into a fever of ill-temper; and he sullenly watched his wife, as she lingered hour after hour at the window, till, in no very gentle accents, he called her to his bed-side.

At that moment Elinor fancied that she heard the sound of approaching wheels, and she strained her eyes to discern, through the deepening gloom, some object that might realize her hopes.  “No,” she sighed, “it was but the wind raving through the leafless oaks—­the ticking of the old dial—­the throbbing of my own heart.  He will not—­he cannot come!”