Richard Feverel was now crossing the River of his Ordeal.  Already the mists were stealing over the land he had left:  his life was cut in two, and he breathed but the air that met his nostrils.  His father, his father’s love, his boyhood and ambition, were shadowy.  His poetic dreams had taken a living attainable shape.  He had a distincter impression of the Autumnal Berry and her household than of anything at Raynham.  And yet the young man loved his father, loved his home:  and I daresay Caesar loved Rome:  but whether he did or no, Caesar when he killed the Republic was quite bald, and the hero we are dealing with is scarce beginning to feel his despotic moustache.  Did he know what he was made of?  Doubtless, nothing at all.  But honest passion has an instinct that can be safer than conscious wisdom.  He was an arrow drawn to the head, flying from the bow.  His audacious mendacities and subterfuges did not strike him as in any way criminal; for he was perfectly sure that the winning and securing of Lucy would in the end be boisterously approved of, and in that case, were not the means justified?  Not that he took trouble to argue thus, as older heroes and self-convicting villains are in the habit of doing; to deduce a clear conscience.  Conscience and Lucy went together.

It was a soft fair day.  The Rubicon sparkled in the morning sun.  One of those days when London embraces the prospect of summer, and troops forth all its babies.  The pavement, the squares, the parks, were early alive with the cries of young Britain.  Violet and primrose girls, and organ boys with military monkeys, and systematic bands very determined in tone if not in tune, filled the atmosphere, and crowned the blazing procession of omnibuses, freighted with business men, Cityward, where a column of reddish brown smoke,—­blown aloft by the South-west, marked the scene of conflict to which these persistent warriors repaired.  Richard had seen much of early London that morning.  His plans were laid.  He had taken care to ensure his personal liberty against accidents, by leaving his hotel and his injured uncle Hippias at sunrise.  To-day or to-morrow his father was to arrive.  Farmer Blaize, Tom Bakewell reported to him, was raging in town.  Another day and she might be torn from him:  but to-day this miracle of creation would be his, and then from those glittering banks yonder, let them summon him to surrender her who dared!  The position of things looked so propitious that he naturally thought the powers waiting on love conspired in his behalf.  And she, too—­since she must cross this river, she had sworn to him to be brave, and do him honour, and wear the true gladness of her heart in her face.  Without a suspicion of folly in his acts, or fear of results, Richard strolled into Kensington Gardens, breakfasting on the foreshadow of his great joy, now with a vision of his bride, now of the new life opening to him.  Mountain masses of clouds, rounded in sunlight, swung up the blue.  The flowering chestnut pavilions overhead rustled and hummed.  A sound in his ears as of a banner unfolding in the joyful distance lulled him.