"Away with this stupid pride!" said Love, clinging to my breast, and whispering; "the Power that made mankind made me, and ordered me never to be far off in the worst of your tribulations. But I must have faith, as even He requires in all His dealings with you. I have offered you as fair a chance as ever was given to a clumsy mortal,--the loveliest creature, a child of my own, as much too good for you as I am. Because the Wicked One has raised a mist, in his loathing of human happiness, are you fool enough to be untrue to me, and shut your blear eyes, and never open them, until nothing is left worth looking at? Go your own way. I have plenty of finer fellows to stand by me." Though he may not have said it so distinctly--and he is not the fellow anyhow that should talk about a mist--it produced the same effect upon me. I felt myself, after a little thinking, very many cuts above Jackson Stoneman and his slippery stuff among the pats of butter. His love was as sound as a roach, and as merry as a grig; and he was welcome to it: a thing like a bleak that flits under a film of the water, and jumps at a midget, and so becomes fit to make pearl of Paris. When the striking-weight of a clock is too heavy, it slurs the hours with such a tug that you cannot even count the strokes; and to me, with that heavy weight upon my heart, time went by untimely: slowly, heavily, and sluggishly, if ever I began to count the ticks; but out of all proper chronology, at periods when I kept no eye upon it. Moreover, I had a number of little things to see to, which had been neglected in my absence, so that it was Tuesday afternoon when I stood at the door of St. Winifred, and wondered whether she had fallen back into rust and ruin once again. The old wall fringed with ivy looked like a billow with a ruffled crest before the white comb breaks from it, and the slumber of the valley was not shaken by groan or shudder of the water-wheel. No smoke was rising from the buttressed chimneys which had been repaired and pointed, neither was there any sign of life, or sound of the harsh Caucasian gabble in which many idle souls delighted. In short, the settlement (which had been so long the puzzle of the neighbourhood, and the blessing of the rate-collectors, for Sûr Imar paid always every penny put upon him) was gone, vanished, a vision of the distance; a pleasant resource for the memory, when not too conceptive at dinner-time; a fact that would fade into a legend soon, and find matter-of-fact disproving it.