She dreamt her dream of that strange world in fear and trembling, conjuring up scenes of horror--tiger hunts; snakes hidden in the corner of a tent; battle; fever; fire; mutiny. Her morbid imagination pictured all possible and impossible danger for the man she loved. And then she thought of his home-coming--for good, for good--for all the span of their joint lives; and she longed for that return with the sickness of hope deferred. She would go back to the Angler’s Nest sometimes after one of these dreamy days upon the river, and would pace about the house or the garden, planning things for her husband’s return, as if he were due next day. She would wheel his own particular chair to the drawing-room fireplace, and look at it, and arrange the fall of the curtains before the old-fashioned bow-window, and change the position of the lamp, and alter the books on the shelves, and do this and that with an eye to effect, anxious to discover how the room might be made prettiest, cosiest, most lovable and home-like--for him, for him, for him! And now she had to resign herself to a year’s delay, perhaps. Yes, he had said it might be a year. All that bright picture of union and content, which had seemed so vivid and so near, had now grown dim and pale. It had melted into a shadowy distance. To a girl who has but just passed her twentieth birthday a year of waiting and delay seems an eternity. “I won’t think of him,” she said to herself, plunging her sculls fiercely into the rippling water. The tide was running down, and it was strong enough to have carried her little boat out to sea like an autumn leaf swept along the current. “I must try to lull my mind to sleep, as if I were an enchanted Princess, and so bridge over twelve slow months of loneliness. I won’t think of you, Martin, my good, brave, truest of the true! I’ll occupy my poor, foolish little mind. I’ll write a novel, perhaps, like old Miss Carver at Dinan. Anything in the world--just to keep my thoughts from always brooding on one subject.” She rowed on steadily, hugging the shore under the wooded hillside, where the rich autumn colouring and the clear, cool lights were so full of beauty--a beauty which she could feel, with a vague, dim sense which just touched the realm of poetry. Perhaps she felt the same sense of loss which Keats or Alfred de Musset would have felt in the stillness of such a scene--the want of something to people the wood and the river--some race of beings loftier than fishermen and peasants; some of those mystic forms which the poet sees amidst the shadows of old woods or in the creeks and sheltered inlets of a secluded river.