With this ever-present consciousness of a fatal future, went the desire to make her lover forget his doom, and the ardent hope that the sentence might be revoked--that the doom pronounced by human judgment might yet be reversed. Indeed, Angus had himself begun to make light of his malady. Who could tell that the famous physician was not a false prophet, after all? The same dire announcement of untimely death had been made to Leigh Hunt, who contrived somehow--not always in the smoothest waters--to steer his frail bark into the haven of old age. Angus spoke of this, hopefully, to Christabel, as they loitered within the roofless crumbling walls of the ancient oratory above St. Nectan's Kieve, one sunny November morning, Miss Bridgeman rambling on the crest of the hill, with the black sheep-dog, Randie, under the polite fiction of blackberry hunting, among hedges which had long been shorn of their last berry, though the freshness of the lichens and ferns still lingered in this sheltered nook. "Yes, I know that cruel doctor was mistaken!" said Christabel, her lips quivering a little, her eyes wide and grave, but tearless, as they gazed at her lover. "I know it, I know it!" "I know that I am twice as strong and well as I was when he saw me," answered Angus; "you have worked as great a miracle for me as ever was wrought at the grave of St. Mertheriana in Minster Churchyard. You have made me happy, and what can cure a man better than perfect bliss. But, oh, my darling! what is to become of me when I leave you, when I return to the beaten ways of London life, and, looking back at these delicious days, ask myself if this sweet life with you is not some dream which I have dreamed, and which can never come again?" "You will not think anything of the kind," said Christabel, with a pretty little air of authority which charmed him--as all her looks and ways charmed him. "You know that I am sober reality, and that our lives are to be spent together. And you are not going back to London--at least not to stop there. You are going to the South of France." "Indeed? this is the first I have heard of any such intention." "Did not that doctor say you were to winter in the South?" "He did. But I thought we had agreed to despise that doctor?" "We will despise him, yet be warned by him. Why should any one, who has liberty and plenty of money, spend his winter in a smoky city, where the fog blinds and stifles him, and the frost pinches him, and the damp makes him miserable, when he can have blue skies, and sunshine and flowers, and ever so much brighter stars, a few hundred miles away? We are bound to obey each other, are we not, Angus? Is not that among our marriage vows?"