of the heath had passed from their brown to their green stage.
Yeobright walked to the edge of the basin which extended down from
Mistover and Rainbarrow.

By this time he was calm, and he looked over the landscape. In the minor
valleys, between the hillocks which diversified the contour of the vale,
the fresh young ferns were luxuriantly growing up, ultimately to reach
a height of five or six feet. He descended a little way, flung himself
down in a spot where a path emerged from one of the small hollows, and
waited. Hither it was that he had promised Eustacia to bring his mother
this afternoon, that they might meet and be friends. His attempt had
utterly failed.

He was in a nest of vivid green. The ferny vegetation round him, though
so abundant, was quite uniform--it was a grove of machine-made foliage,
a world of green triangles with saw-edges, and not a single flower. The
air was warm with a vaporous warmth, and the stillness was unbroken.
Lizards, grasshoppers, and ants were the only living things to
be beheld. The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the
carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the fern
kind; when there was neither bud nor blossom, nothing but a monotonous
extent of leafage, amid which no bird sang.

When he had reclined for some considerable time, gloomily pondering, he
discerned above the ferns a drawn bonnet of white silk approaching from
the left, and Yeobright knew directly that it covered the head of her
he loved. His heart awoke from its apathy to a warm excitement, and,
jumping to his feet, he said aloud, "I knew she was sure to come."

She vanished in a hollow for a few moments, and then her whole form
unfolded itself from the brake.

"Only you here?" she exclaimed, with a disappointed air, whose
hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low
laugh. "Where is Mrs. Yeobright?"

"She has not come," he replied in a subdued tone.

"I wish I had known that you would be here alone," she said seriously,
"and that we were going to have such an idle, pleasant time as this.
Pleasure not known beforehand is half wasted; to anticipate it is to
double it. I have not thought once today of having you all to myself
this afternoon, and the actual moment of a thing is so soon gone."

"It is indeed."

"Poor Clym!" she continued, looking tenderly into his face. "You are
sad. Something has happened at your home. Never mind what is--let us
only l