This scene of unthrobbing peacefulness was beheld by Rhoda with her first conscious delight in it.  She gazed round on the farm, under a quick new impulse of affection for her old home.  And whose hand was it that could alone sustain the working of the farm, and had done so, without reward?  Her eyes travelled up to Wrexby Hall, perfectly barren of any feeling that she was to enter the place, aware only that it was full of pain for her.  She accused herself, but could not accept the charge of her having ever hoped for transforming events that should twist and throw the dear old farm-life long back into the fields of memory.  Nor could she understand the reason of her continued coolness to Robert.  Enough of accurate reflection was given her to perceive that discontent with her station was the original cause of her discontent now.  What she had sown she was reaping:—­and wretchedly colourless are these harvests of our dream!  The sun has not shone on them.  They may have a tragic blood-hue, as with Dahlia’s; but they will never have any warm, and fresh, and nourishing sweetness—­the juice which is in a single blade of grass.

A longing came upon Rhoda to go and handle butter.  She wished to smell it as Mrs. Sumfit drubbed and patted and flattened and rounded it in the dairy; and she ran down the slope, meeting her father at the gate.  He was dressed in his brushed suit, going she knew whither, and when he asked if she had seen her uncle, she gave for answer a plain negative, and longed more keenly to be at work with her hands, and to smell the homely creamy air under the dairy-shed.

CHAPTER XLIV

She watched her father as he went across the field and into the lane.  Her breathing was suppressed till he appeared in view at different points, more and more distant, and then she sighed heavily, stopped her breathing, and hoped her unshaped hope again.  The last time he was in sight, she found herself calling to him with a voice like that of a burdened sleeper:  her thought being, “How can you act so cruelly to Robert!” He passed up Wrexby Heath, and over the black burnt patch where the fire had caught the furzes on a dry Maynight, and sank on the side of the Hall.

When we have looked upon a picture of still green life with a troubled soul, and the blow falls on us, we accuse Nature of our own treachery to her.  Rhoda hurried from the dairy-door to shut herself up in her room and darken the light surrounding her.  She had turned the lock, and was about systematically to pull down the blind, when the marvel of beholding Dahlia stepping out of the garden made her for a moment less the creature of her sickened senses.  Dahlia was dressed for a walk, and she went very fast.  The same paralysis of motion afflicted Rhoda as when she was gazing after her father; but her hand stretched out instinctively for her bonnet when Dahlia had crossed the green and the mill-bridge, and was no more visible.  Rhoda drew her bonnet on, and caught her black silk mantle in her hand, and without strength to throw it across her shoulders, dropped before her bed, and uttered a strange prayer.  “Let her die rather than go back to disgrace, my God! my God!”