She was full of grave thoughts on this her last night in Warwickshire. It was more than a year—a year and a quarter—since she had come home for good, as the phrase goes, and a year and a quarter makes a large section of a young life. The years are so long in early youth, when the heart and mind live so fast, and every day is a history: so strangely different from the monotonous years of middle age, which glide past unawares, like the level flats seen from a canal-boat, each meadow so like the last that the voyager is unconscious of progress, till he feels the salt breath of Death’s ocean creeping across the low marshes of declining life, and knows that his journey is nearly done. To Daphne that year at South Hill had been a lifetime. How ardently she had felt and thought and suffered within the time; what resolutions made and broken; what fevers of dangerous delight, and dull intervals of remorse; what wild wicked hopes; what black despair! Looking back at the time that was gone and dead, she was inclined to exaggerate its joys, to gloss over its pain. ‘At the worst I have been happy with him,’ she said, remembering how much of that vanished time had been spent in Gerald Goring’s society, ‘though he is nothing to me, and never can be anything to me but a man to be shunned; yet we have been happy together, and that is something.’ She remembered some lines of Dryden’s which Gerald had quoted in her presence: ‘To-morrow do thy worst, for I have lived to-day. Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine, The joys I have possessed, in spite of Fate, are mine.’ She had lived her day. There had been moments in the past; moments that had stirred the deeps of her soul with a power as mysterious as the sweep of the angelic wing on Bethesda’s pool; moments when she had fancied herself beloved by him, whom to love was treason. These stood out upon the page of memory in fiery characters, and in their supernal light all the rest of the record seemed dull and dark. There had been hours of unquestioning bliss when she had in no wise reasoned upon her happiness, when she had not asked herself whether she was loved or scorned, but had been happy as the summer insects are among the flowers, vivified by the sunshine, asking nothing but to live and enjoy that glorious warmth and brightness. So at times she had abandoned herself to the delight of his society, whom she had loved from the hour of their first meeting, giving all her heart and mind to him at once, as utterly as Juliet gave hers to Romeo.