She felt as if some cold hand had been laid on her heart:—here spoke again the voice of the sick soul determined to renounce. And here was the one man in her whole world, to whom she would so fain give extravagantly. There are natures to which love means taking only; others to which it means giving all. How she would have given! The ache of the tide thrust back upon her heart rose to her very throat. She went white, even to her brave lips. But still they smiled, as women’s lips will smile in such straits. “You mind me,” she said, “that I was after all forgetting to gather the hellebore. ’Tis a dark drug-plant, cousin and loves the shade; and, if the old simplers speak truth, it must be gathered before a ray of sun shall of a morning have opened its green petals. I see that I must hurry. Already the shadow of your grey tower is shortening across the beds.” She took her basket from his arm, gave him a little nod as of dismissal and passed quickly from him. He let her go without a word or a gesture, standing still, wrapt in himself, with eyes downcast. Those deep waters in his soul, that for so many long years had lain black and stagnant—what was it that had so stirred them of late days, that they should rise in waves like the salt and bitter sea and dash against his laboriously built dykes of peace and renunciation? Ellinor was long on her knees beside the hellebore, not indeed that she was busy picking it, for her hands lay idly before her. With eyes fixed unseeingly upon its dark, poisonous looking tufts, she was tasting the savour of a slow gathering tear. Suddenly she felt her cousin’s presence again close upon her and began feverishly to tear at the plant, every energy of her mind bent upon concealing her weakness. In another moment, with a sweetness that was almost overpowering, she knew that he was kneeling beside her, his shoulder to her shoulder, his hands over hers. “Dear Ellinor,” he said softly in her ear, “I do not like to see you touch this poisonous plant, let me——” And then, breaking off, when she turned her face, so close to his, as if irresistibly drawn to seek his glance: “Forgive me!” he cried, with more emotion than she had ever heard his measured tones express before. “By what right am I always thus casting upon your happy heart the shadow of my gloom!” Her fingers closed passionately round his. “David,” she said, almost in a whisper, “don’t forget I too have known suffering. David you were wrong just now. The sweet and the bitter work together make wholesome beverage. And see, for that do I gather hellebore that it may blend with the borage. Did I not tell you so? And—ah, forgive, but I must say it, sometimes the bitterness and the sorrow are not real, only fancied.... And then it may be that real adversity must come to make us see it. And even then, if we do see it, sweet are the uses of adversity!”