foliage and peeps of scenic peace.  The prospect of an escape from it inspired thoughts of a loveable round of life where the sun was not a naked ball of fire, but a friend clothed in woodland; where park and meadow swept to well-known features East and West; and distantly circling hills, and the hearts of poor cottagers too—­sympathy with whom assured her of goodness—­were familiar, homely to the dweller in the place, morning and night.  And she had the love of wild flowers, the watchful happiness in the seasons; poets thrilled her, books absorbed.  She dwelt strongly on that sincerity of feeling; it gave her root in our earth; she needed it as she pressed a hand on her eyeballs, conscious of acting the invalid, though the reasons she had for languishing under headache were so convincing that her brain refused to disbelieve in it and went some way to produce positive throbs.  Otherwise she had no excuse for shutting herself in her room.  Vernon Whitford would be sceptical.  Headache or none, Colonel De Craye must be thinking strangely of her; she had not shown him any sign of illness.  His laughter and his talk sung about her and dispersed the fiction; he was the very sea-wind for bracing unstrung nerves.  Her ideas reverted to Sir Willoughby, and at once they had no more cohesion than the foam on a torrent-water.

But soon she was undergoing a variation of sentiment.  Her maid Barclay brought her this pencilled line from her father: 

“Factum est; laetus est; amantium irae, etc.”

That it was done, that Willoughby had put on an air of glad acquiescence, and that her father assumed the existence of a lovers’ quarrel, was wonderful to her at first sight, simple the succeeding minute.  Willoughby indeed must be tired of her, glad of her going.  He would know that it was not to return.  She was grateful to him for perhaps hinting at the amantium irae, though she rejected the folly of the verse.  And she gazed over dear homely country through her windows now.  Happy the lady of the place, if happy she can be in her choice!  Clara Middleton envied her the double-blossom wild cherry-tree, nothing else.  One sprig of it, if it had not faded and gone to dust-colour like crusty Alpine snow in the lower hollows, and then she could depart, bearing away a memory of the best here!  Her fiction of the headache pained her no longer.  She changed her muslin dress for silk; she was contented with the first bonnet Barclay presented.  Amicable toward every one in the house, Willoughby included, she threw up her window, breathed, blessed mankind; and she thought:  “If Willoughby would open his heart to nature, he would be relieved of his wretched opinion of the world.”  Nature was then sparkling refreshed in the last drops of a sweeping rain-curtain, favourably disposed for a background to her joyful optimism.  A little nibble of hunger within, real hunger, unknown to her of late, added to this healthy view, without precipitating her to appease it; she was more inclined to foster it, for the sake of the sinewy activity of mind and limb it gave her; and in the style of young ladies very light of heart, she went downstairs like a cascade, and like the meteor observed in its vanishing trace she alighted close to Colonel De Craye and entered one of the rooms off the hall.