m. He will come." So she waited,
as some grey lake lies, full and smooth, awaiting the star below the
twilight. If she let her thoughts run on to the hour of their meeting,
she had to shut her eyes and press at her heart; but as yet she was not
out of tune for daily life, and she could imagine how that hour was to
be strewn with new songs and hushed surprises. And 'thus' he would look:
and 'thus.' "My hero!" breathed Emilia, shuddering a little. But now
she was perplexed. Now that he had come and gone, she began to hunger
bitterly for the sight of his face, and that which had hitherto
nourished her grew a sickly phantom of delight. She wondered how she
had forced herself to be patient, and what it was that she had found
pleasure in.

None of the ladies were at home when Emilia returned. She went out
to the woods, and sat, shadowed by the long bent branch; watching
mechanically the slow rounding and yellowing of the beam of sunlight
over the thick floor of moss, up against the fir-stems. The chaffinch
and the linnet flitted off the grey orchard twigs, singing from new
stations; and the bee seemed to come questioning the silence of the
woods and droning disappointed away. The first excess of any sad feeling
is half voluntary. Emilia could not help smiling, when she lifted her
head out of a musing fit, to find that she had composed part of a minuet
for the languid dancing motes in the shaft of golden light at her feet.
"Can I remember it?" she thought, and forgot the incident with the
effort.

Down at her right hand, bordering a water, stood a sallow, a dead tree,
channelled inside with the brown trail of a goat-moth. Looking in this
direction, she saw Cornelia advancing to the tree. When the lady had
reached it, she drew a little book from her bosom, kissed it, and
dropped it in the hollow. This done, she passed among the firs. Emilia
had perceived that she was agitated: and with that strange instinct of
hearts beginning to stir, which makes them divine at once where they
will come upon the secret of their own sensations, she ran down to the
tree and peered on tiptoe at the embedded volume. On a blank page stood
pencilled: "This is the last fruit of the tree. Come not to gather
more." There was no meaning for her in that sentimental chord but she
must have got some glimpse of a meaning; for now, as in an agony, her
lips fashioned the words: "If I forget his face I may as well die;" and
she wandered on, striving more and