In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers in a fruit-market.

In all this proud show some kernels were unsound as her own situation, and she wondered if there were one world in the universe where the fruit had no worm, and marriage no sorrow.
Herr Tannhauser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him distinctly visible yet.

Could she have heard Fitzpiers's voice at that moment she would have found him murmuring-- "...Towards the loadstar of my one desire I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light." But he was a silent spectacle to her now.

Soon he rose out of the valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his right, which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy clay, the character and herbage of the two formations being so distinct that the calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a few years' antiquity upon the level vale.

He kept along the edge of this high, unenclosed country, and the sky behind him being deep violet, she could still see white Darling in relief upon it--a mere speck now--a Wouvermans eccentricity reduced to microscopic dimensions.