"Is not peace enough?" he thought. "Is not love enough? Can I not be
reconciled, like a woman? Is not that salvation, and happiness? What is
all the rest, but 'sound and fury, signifying nothing?"
And as though afraid to lose his hold of that thought, he got up and
hurried from the grove.
The whole wide landscape of field and wood, cut by the pale roads, was
glimmering under the afternoon sun, Here was no wild, wind-swept land,
gleaming red and purple, and guarded by the grey rocks; no home of the
winds, and the wild gods. It was all serene and silver-golden. In place
of the shrill wailing pipe of the hunting buzzard-hawks half lost up in
the wind, invisible larks were letting fall hymns to tranquillity;
and even the sea--no adventuring spirit sweeping the shore with its
wing--seemed to lie resting by the side of the land.
CHAPTER XV
When on the afternoon of that same day Miltoun did not come, all the
chilly doubts which his presence alone kept away, crowded thick and fast
into the mind of one only too prone to distrust her own happiness. It
could not last--how could it?
His nature and her own were so far apart! Even in that giving of herself
which had been such happiness, she had yet doubted; for there was so
much in him that was to her mysterious. All that he loved in poetry and
nature, had in it something craggy and culminating.
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