But many complexities in the working out mark Browning's design.

The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish.

The chance meeting of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would hardly have occurred to any one else.
The _Pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the previous half-dozen years.

Since _The Ring and the Book_ he had become a famous personage; his successive poems had been everywhere reviewed at length; a large public was genuinely interested in him, while a yet larger complained of his "obscurity," but did not venture to ignore him, and gossiped eagerly about his private life.

He himself, mingling freely, an ever-welcome guest, in the choicest London society, had the air of having accepted the world as cordially as it on the whole accepted him.