The unfortunate young man could not give way to any outbreak of the passion that consumed him; he could but go on hotly--on past St. Roque's, where flowers still lay in the porch, and the open doors invited strangers, to the silent country, where the fields lay callow under the touch of spring. Spring! everlasting mockery of human trouble! Here were the hedgerows stirring, the secret grain beginning to throb conscious in the old furrows; but life itself standing still--coming to a sudden end in this heart which filled the young man's entire frame with pulsations of anguish. All his existence had flowed towards this day, and took its termination here. His love--heaven help him! he had but one heart, and had thrown it away; his work--that too was to come to nothing, and be ended; all his traditions, all his hopes, were they to be buried in one grave? and what was to become after of the posthumous and nameless life? CHAPTER XXI. WHEN the minister fully came to himself, it was after a long rapid walk of many miles through the silent fields and hazy country. There the clouds cleared off from him in the quietness. When he began to see clearly he turned back towards Carlingford. Nothing now stood between him and the crisis which henceforward must determine his personal affairs. He turned in the long country road, which he had been pursuing eagerly without knowing what he was doing, and gazed back towards the distant roofs. His heart ached and throbbed with the pangs that were past. He had a consciousness that it stirred within his breast, still smarting and thrilling with that violent access of agony--but the climax was over. The strong pulsations fell into dull beats of indefinite pain. Now for the other world--the neutral-coloured life. Vincent did not very well know which road he had taken, for he had not been thinking of where he was going; but it roused him a little to perceive that his homeward way brought him through Grove Street, and past Siloam Cottage, where Mr. Tufton lived.