ppiness; it was happiness of a
very harmless kind--the satisfaction of thought, the bliss of mere
consciousness; but such as it was it did not elude him nor turn bitter
in his heart, and the long summer day closed upon him before his spirit,
hovering in perpetual circles round the idea of what might be, had begun
to rest its wing. When he rose to his feet again it was too late to
return to Blanquais in the same way that he had come; the evening was
at hand, the light was already fading, and the walk he had taken was
one which even if he had not felt very tired, he would have thought it
imprudent to attempt to repeat in the darkness. He made his way to the
nearest village, where he was able to hire a rustic carriole, in which
primitive conveyance, gaining the high-road, he jogged and jostled
through the hours of the evening slowly back to his starting-point. It
wanted an hour of midnight by the time he reached his inn, and there was
nothing left for him but to go to bed.

He went in the unshaken faith that he should leave Blanquais early on
the morrow. But early on the morrow it occurred to him that it would be
simply grotesque to go off without taking leave of Mrs. Vivian and her
daughter, and offering them some explanation of his intention. He had
given them to understand that, so delighted was he to find them there,
he would remain at Blanquais at least as long as they. He must have
seemed to them wanting in civility, to spend a whole bright Sunday
without apparently troubling his head about them, and if the unlucky
fact of his being in love with the girl were a reason for doing his
duty, it was at least not a reason for being rude. He had not yet come
to that--to accepting rudeness as an incident of virtue; it had always
been his theory that virtue had the best manners in the world, and he
flattered himself at any rate that he could guard his integrity without
making himself ridiculous. So, at what he thought a proper hour, in
the course of the morning, he retraced his steps along the little lane
through which, two days ago, Angela Vivian had shown him the way to
her mother's door. At this humble portal he knocked; the windows of the
little chalet were open, and the white curtains, behind the flower-pots,
were fluttering as he had seen them before. The door was opened by
a neat young woman, who informed him very promptly that Madame and
Mademoiselle had left Blanquais a couple of hours earlier. They had gone
to Paris