His blood began to sing: O happy those within, to see her, and be about her! By some extraordinary process he contrived to cast a sort of glory round the burly person of Farmer Blaize himself.

And oh! to have companionship with a seraph one must know a seraph's bliss, and was not young Tom to be envied?
The smell of late clematis brought on the wind enwrapped him, and went to his brain, and threw a light over the old red-brick house, for he remembered where it grew, and the winter rose-tree, and the jessamine, and the passion-flower: the garden in front with the standard roses tended by her hands; the long wall to the left striped by the branches of the cherry, the peep of a further garden through the wall, and then the orchard, and the fields beyond--the happy circle of her dwelling! it flashed before his eyes while he looked on the darkness.

And yet it was the reverse of hope which kindled this light and inspired the momentary calm he experienced: it was despair exaggerating delusion, wilfully building up on a groundless basis.

"For the tenacity of true passion is terrible," says The Pilgrim's Scrip: "it will stand against the hosts of heaven, God's great array of Facts, rather than surrender its aim, and must be crushed before it will succumb--sent to the lowest pit!" He knew she was not there; she was gone.

But the power of a will strained to madness fought at it, kept it down, conjured forth her ghost, and would have it as he dictated.