to her; so quick to understand her wants,
so eager to fulfil them; so bound to her by associations; so fit a mate
for the very differences between them. And now these two claims were no
longer compatible; in his very love for her he had ended that
possibility. All those old dreams; the little scenes she had rehearsed,
of their first mass, their first communion together; their walks in the
twilight; their rides over the hills; the new ties that were to draw the
old ladies at the Hall and herself so close together--all this was
changed; some of those dreams were now for ever impossible, others only
possible on terms that she trembled even to think of. Perhaps it was
worst of all to reflect that she was in some measure responsible for his
change of religion; she fancied that it was through her slowness to
respond to light, her delaying to confide in him, that he had been driven
through impatience to take this step. And so week after week went by and
she dared not answer his letter.

The old ladies, too, were sorely puzzled at her. It was impossible for
them to know how far her religion was changing. She had kept up the same
reserve towards them lately as towards Hubert, chiefly because she feared
to disappoint them; and so after an attempt to tell each other a little
of their mutual sympathy, the three women were silent on the subject of
the lad who was so much to them all.

She began to show her state a little in her movements and appearance. She
was languid, soon tired and dispirited; she would go for short, lonely
walks, and fall asleep in her chair worn out when she came in. Her grey
eyes looked longer and darker; her eyelids and the corners of her mouth
began to droop a little.

Then in October he came home.

Isabel had been out a long afternoon walk by herself through the
reddening woods. They had never, since the first awakening of the
consciousness of beauty in her, meant so little to her as now. It
appeared as if that keen unity of a life common to her and all living
things had been broken or obscured; and that she walked in an isolation
all the more terrible in that she was surrounded by the dumb presence of
what she loved. Last year the quick chattering cry of the blackbird, the
evening mists over the meadows, the stir of the fading life of the woods,
the rustling scamper of the rabbit over the dead leaves, the solemn call
of the homing rooks--all this, only last year, went to make up the sweet
natural atmos