"She _does_ love you, Sir; for you have given her the greatest happiness
she has ever known. Last night she sat looking silently into the fire
there with a strange gloom on her bonnie face, and, when I asked what
she was dreaming of, she turned to me with a look of pain and fear, as
if dismayed at some great loss, but she only said, 'He is going, Jean!
What shall I do?'"

"Poor child! she will miss her friend and teacher, when I'm gone; and I
shall miss the only human creature that has seemed to care for me for
years," I sighed,--adding, as I paused upon the threshold of the door,
"Say nothing of this to Effie till I come to-morrow, Jean."

I went away, and far out on the lonely moor sat down to think. Like a
weird magician, Memory led me back into the past, calling up the hopes
and passions buried there. My childhood,--fatherless and motherless,
but not unhappy; for no wish was ungratified, no idle whim denied. My
boyhood,--with no shadows over it but those my own wayward will called
up. My manhood,--when the great joy of my life arose, my love for
Agnes, a midsummer dream of bloom and bliss, so short-lived and so
sweet! I felt again the pang that wrung my heart when she coldly gave me
back the pledge I thought so sacred and so sure, and the music of her
marriage-bells tolled the knell of my lost love. I seemed to hear them
still wafted across the purple moor through the silence of those fifteen
years.

My life looked gray and joyless as the wide waste lying hushed around
me, unblessed with the verdure of a single hope, a single love; and as I
looked down the coming years, my way seemed very solitary, very dark.