Then, bidding God bless her, he wrings her hand, strongly, and so takes his last farewell of her, nor ever sees her fair face and great gentle stag eyes again. And now he is gone--gone with a difficult smile on his face, and very little money in his pocket. He never has much, but he has less than usual now; having spent his few last sovereigns on the erecting a plain white cross at the head of Jack's low grave, that, when this generation has passed, his place of sleeping may not be quite undistinguished from that of his neighbour dust. He has gone, with his heart's strongest longing balked, his prime hope death-smitten; but yet not despairing--not cursing his day, nor arraigning High God, saying, "Why do I, undeserving, thus suffer?" He carries away with him no heavy seething load of revenge, no man-slaying ardour of hatred against the woman that has wronged him, and the man for whose sake she did it. Life is full, interesting, complex--not all on one string, whatever morbid women and moody rhymers may say; not all sexual love--all of it, that is, that is not devoted to drinking, as Anacreon, Catullus, and Moore have dulcetly told us. And therefore, though poor, disappointed, and heart-wrung, Brandon is not all unhappy. He has been greatly sinned against, and has forgiven, thus exercising the function that raises us nearest to a level with the Godhead. And meanwhile Esther, left behind in wintry Wales, takes his emptied place at _triste_ Plas Berwyn. Despite all her resolves, despite her high talk that a morsel of Mrs. Brandon's bread would choke her--that it would be better to starve than to be under any obligation to the family of the man she has betrayed--she is now eating that suffocating bread, now lying under those annihilating obligations. Want makes us swallow our dignity--makes us do many mean things. One _must_ live; one must keep in that breath that perhaps is only spent in sighs: and Mr. James Greenwood has made us all out of love with the workhouse. So she sits down three times a day at Mrs. Brandon's table, the unwillingest guest that ever sat at any board, and eats the bread of charity, and the roast mutton and apple-tart of charity, when the conclusion of the long Puritan grace gives her permission to do so. There is plenty of time for thinking at Plas Berwyn, for in that still household talk is not rife. When people never leave their own little one earth-nook, rarely see any one beyond their immediate family circle, and rarelier still read any reviews, papers, books, that treat of any subject but one, they have not much to talk about. There are few minds original enough, copious enough, to suffice to themselves--to be able to do without supplies derived from external objects. Our thoughts are generally our own, merely by right of immediate possession; mostly they are the thoughts of others, more or less digested, more or less amalgamated with thought-matter of our own.