"When the tempests of Autumn have turban'd the peak, And the gray shadows hover above their stronghold; Yet the fruitage still lingers--a faint purple streak, And the ripe corn embroiders the breastland with gold; Though my heart may be quailing at the storm-clouds above, Like the harvest, it answers the sunshine of love. "When the mountains are turned into caverns by snow, And the heavens are black with the fury of cold, When the spectre of Rakhabat stalks to and fro, And the gaunt wolf is howling alone on the wold; With the ice-crags around us, and the avalanche above, My love shall not shiver in the breast of his love." CHAPTER XXXIV REJOICING When I was going home that night, a very strange thing befell me, which but for the mercy of Providence would have left me nothing more to say. Although there had been very little chance of making sweet speeches to Dariel, because her father would not leave the room, yet her rich clear voice thrilled through me so that I scarcely knew what I was doing, and resolved to put all upon the cast at once, rather than flutter, and quiver, and tremble till some swaggering foreigner rushed in. Modest I was; and think no harm to confess it, having never had chance to grow out of it, by any fat manuring while my roots were young. Humble I was; and who would not be so, unless he were fool enough not to know the difference between a mere hulking clodpole and the exquisite perfection of the Maker's finest work? Timid too I may have been; and who can be surprised, when even a stockbroker trembled at our Grace? But as for my being a jelly-fish, could any such creature have done what I did? I held the hand of my darling as long as I dared at the corner of the passage, when her father was looking for a lantern, and I said with an audacity which frightened me as soon as I had time to think of it, "To-morrow I must know my fate. Will you be in the chapel, about three o'clock? Or any time, any time; I will wait for hours." "What can make you ask me such a thing?" she answered, and I said, "Don't you know, Dariel?" And she drew back, and whispered, "I will try--if my father has no objection." Now it was the thought of this that sent me in a most exalted yet highly disordered condition of mind upon my homeward course. If order is heaven's first law, as some one says, the entire code must be suspended when the human race is in its most heavenly state. To me the earth was nothing; and the stars alone and the distant sublimity of the sky had any claim of kindred. Leaving _Bess_ (who was very tired) to the care of Stepan, with a careless toss I flung my gun upon my right shoulder, and strode forth into the darkness.