more intense than
anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as
bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man's grunt over a crust.
He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice,
and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety,
represented any real contest with pain. Life must be lovely and amusing
for such a lovely and amusing person. These were but youth's moody
fandangoes. He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and
swooping of a white sea-bird. So he stood on the bridge, leaving her
soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view. Surely this
country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen's mind. It was so like
her. It was beautiful and solitary even as she was. The loch that
stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was
fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills
around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with
some metallic spider's web of engineering; even so would romantic and
utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch. And the firs which formed a
glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the
very song of melancholy's soul, were cut by the twirling wind into
shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen. And this magnificent avenue
that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the
hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not
unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.

But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort
which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned. There was, she felt,
some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it
could be. If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden
from her heart. She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and
jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy
might have done, took no notice. But she shivered because this tangible
lump of misery was still within her. She must run about, or the beating
of her heart would become an agony. "Rachael and I found a water-rat
under the bridge," she cried; "preening its whiskers it was, quite the
thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff. Let's go and see
if there's one now." She turned round, stared for a minute at the
south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bru