Nevertheless, Beatrice’s society amused and distracted her mind, and kept her from brooding over her own troubles.  She was glad enough to go over to Shadonake; even to sit alone with Beatrice and her mother was better than the eternal monotony of the vicarage, where she felt like a prisoner waiting for his sentence.

Yes, she was waiting.  Waiting for some sign from the man she loved.  Sooner or later, whether it was for good or for evil, she knew it must come to her; some token that he remembered her existence; some indication as to what he would have her do with the life that she had laid at his feet.  For, after all, when a woman loves a man, she virtually makes him the ruler of her destiny; she leaves the responsibility of her fate in his hands.  For the nonce, Maurice Kynaston held the skein of Vera’s life in his grasp; it was for him to do what he pleased with it.  Some day, doubtless, he would tell her what she had to do:  meanwhile, she waited.

What else, indeed, can a woman do but wait?  To sit still with folded hands and bated breath, to possess her soul in patience as best she may, to still the wild beatings of her all too eager spirit—­that is what a woman has to do, and does often enough.  God help her, all too badly.

It is so easy when one is old, and the pulses are sluggish, and the hot passions of youth are quelled, it is so easy then to learn that lesson of waiting; but when we are young, and our best days slipping away, and life’s hopes all before us, and life’s burdens well-nigh unbearable; then it is that it is hard, that waiting in itself becomes terrible—­more terrible almost than the worst of our woes.

So wearily, feverishly, impatiently enough, Vera waited.

Winter died away into spring.  The rough wind of March, worn out with its own boisterous passions, sobbed itself to rest like a tired child, and little green buds came cropping up sparsely and timidly out of the brown bosom of the earth; and, presently, all the glory of the golden crocuses unfolded itself in long golden lines in the vicarage garden; and there were twittering of birds and flutterings of soft breezes among the tree-tops, and a voice seemed to go forth over the face of the earth.  The winter is over, and summer is nigh at hand.

And then it came to her at last.  An envelope by the side of her plate at breakfast; a few scrawled words in a handwriting she had never seen before, and yet identified with an unfailing instinct, ere even she broke the seal.  One minute of wild hope, to be followed by a sick, chill numbness, and the story of her love and its longings shrank away into the despair of impossibility.

How small a thing to make so great a misery!  What a few words to make a wilderness of a human life!

"Her grandfather is dead, and she has claimed me.  Good-bye; forget me and forgive me."

That was all; nothing more.  No passionate regrets, no unavailing self-pity; nothing to tell her what it cost him to resign her; no word to comfort her for the hopelessness of his desertion; nothing but those two lines.