He drove away, and she remained at her door looking up at the summer blue
sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same
place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily
drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable
vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the
house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the
unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such
glimpses do. Of her high intentions, nothing had resulted. An inexorable
centrifugality had thrown her off at every point where she tried to cling.
Nothing of what was established and regulated had desired her intervention;
a few accidents and irregularities had alone accepted it. But now she felt
that nothing withal had been lost; a magnitude, a serenity, a tolerance,
intimated itself in the universal frame of things, where her failure, her
recreancy, her folly, seemed for the moment to come into true perspective,
and to show venial and unimportant, to be limited to itself, and to be even
good in its effect of humbling her to patience with all imperfection and
shortcoming, even her own. She was aware of the cessation of a struggle
that has never since renewed itself with the old intensity; her wishes, her
propensities, ceased in that degree to represent evil in conflict with the
portion of good in her; they seemed so mixed and interwoven with the good
that they could no longer be antagonised; for the moment they seemed in
their way even wiser and better, and ever after to be the nature out of
which good as well as evil might come.
As she remained standing there, Mr. Brandreth came round the corner of the
house, looking very bright and happy.
"Miss Kilburn," he said abruptly, "I want you to congratulate me. I'm
engaged to Miss Chapley."
"Are you indeed, Mr. Brandreth? I do congratulate you with all my heart.
She is a lovely girl."
"Yes, it's all right now," said Mr. Brandreth. "I've come to tell you the
first one, because you seemed to take an interest in it when I told you of
the trouble about the Juliet. We hadn't come to any understanding before
that, but that seemed to bring us both to the point, and--and we're
engaged. Mother and I are going to New York for the winter; we think she
can risk it; and at any rate she won't be separated from me; and we shall
be back in our little home next May. You know that I'm to be with Mr.
Chapley in his business?"