The winter might yet return for a season, but this day was of the spring and its promises.

Earth and air, field and sky were full of peace.

But the heart of England was troubled--troubled with passions both good and evil--with righteous indignation and unholy scorn, with the love of liberty and the joy of license, with ambition and aspiration.
No honest heart could yield long to the comforting of the fair world, knowing that some of her fairest fields would soon be crimsoned afresh with the blood of her children.

But Dorothy's sadness was not all for her country in general.

Had she put the question honestly to her heart, she must have confessed that even the loss of her mother had less to do with a certain weight upon it, which the loveliness of the spring day seemed to render heavier, than the rarely absent feeling rather than thought, that the playmate of her childhood, and the offered lover of her youth, had thrown himself with all the energy of dawning manhood into the quarrel of the lawless and self-glorifying.