Once, in the cold noon of a lovely day of frost, when the lightest step crackled with the breaking of multitudinous crystals, when the trees were fringed with furry white, and the old spider-webs glimmered like filigrane of fairy silver, they met on a lonely country-road.  The sun shone red through depths of half-frozen vapour, and tinged the whiteness of death with a faint warmth of feeling and hope.  Along the rough lane Richard walked reading what looked like a letter, but was a copy his father had procured of a poem still only in manuscript—­the Lycidas of Milton.  In the glow to which the alternating hot and cold winds of enthusiasm and bereavement had fanned the fiery particle within him, Richard was not only able to understand and enjoy the thought of which the poem was built, but was borne aloft on its sad yet hopeful melodies as upon wings of an upsoaring seraph.  The flow of his feeling suddenly broken by an almost fierce desire to share with Dorothy the tenderness of the magic music of the stately monody, and then, ere the answering waves of her emotion had subsided, to whisper to her that the marvellous spell came from the heart of the same wonderful man from whose brain had issued, like Pallas from Jove’s,—­ what?—­Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnus, the pamphlet which had so roused all the abhorrence her nature was capable of—­he lifted his head and saw her but a few paces from him.  Dorothy caught a glimpse of a countenance radiant with feeling, and eyes flashing through a watery film of delight; her own eyes fell; she said, ‘Good morning, Richard!’ and passed him without deflecting an inch.  The bird of song folded its wings and called in its shining; the sun lost half his red beams; the sprinkled seed pearls vanished, and ashes covered the earth; he folded the paper, laid it in the breast of his doublet, and walked home through the glittering meadows with a fresh hurt in his heart.

Dorothy’s time and thoughts were all but occupied with the nursing of her mother, who, contrary to the expectation of her friends, outlived the winter, and revived as the spring drew on.  She read much to her.  Some of the best books had drifted into the house and settled there, but, although English printing was now nearly two centuries old, they were not many.  We must not therefore imagine, however, that the two ladies were ill supplied with spiritual pabulum.  There are few houses of the present day in which, though there be ten times as many books, there is so much strong food; if there was any lack, it was rather of diluents.  Amongst those she read were Queen Elizabeth’s Homilies, Hooker’s Politie, Donne’s Sermons, and George Herbert’s Temple, to the dying lady only less dear than her New Testament.