id, obeying an impulse which surprised himself, "do you
believe in me?"

This time she gave him a straight glance.

"Yes," she answered. "You might do a great deal if you could forget
yourself for a few months."

Pensee, much troubled and full of thoughts, walked over to them.

"Oh, Sara!" she said, "isn't it terrible? If you could have seen them
both this morning--she looked so beautiful, perfectly lovely--a sight I
never can forget. And now this blow! What man can teach men to
understand the will of God?"

CHAPTER IX

Robert and Brigit were silent with happiness on their way to
Southampton. Side by side they watched the country through the carriage
windows. There had been a fog in London when they left, and the sun, at
intervals, shone out like a live coal among dying embers. All was
obscured; the foot-passengers and passing vehicles seemed black straying
shadows in the atmosphere. But the express emerged at last from the
clinging darkness into autumnal fields, some brown after the harvest,
others studded with hay-ricks. At one point in the landscape they
noticed a flock of sheep drinking at a stream. The boy who guarded them
waved his cap at the train, and this little signal, coming, as it were,
from human nature, gave them a reassurance of the day's reality. Near
Bishopstoke the clouds were white and dense, but, rippling in places,
they disclosed blue stretches of the heaven which, in their masses, they
concealed. Southampton began with small houses. One had a tattered
garden, where a stone copy of the Medicean Venus stood on a patch of
squalid turf near a clothes' line and against an ivy-grown wall. Then
the green sands were reached. The sea, like liquid granite, sparkled in
the distance. Rows of dull dwellings, shops, public-houses, and hotels
came next. The train, with a shriek, rushed into the station. It was
still too early for lunch, so they walked down to the pier, where they
saw several yachts and pleasure-boats at anchor in the harbour, and the
New Forest greenly outlined in the distance. These were the things which
engraved themselves on Brigit's mind. The impressibility of youth is
retentive for outward objects, but the inner mood--the sensation and
idea which make the mental state--lives unconsciously, and is recognised
only in the long process of time. Brigit could have described the scene,
but her emotions did not seem to her, emotions. Absorbed by them, and in
them, she neither abandone