‘And Mars Phineas says as they du say,’ added William, ‘that Sir John he be a-leaving the Chase for good, and not intending to come back to it never again no more.’ So the worst was not the worst, after all, and the tragedy not so complete but that Fate must provide an anticlimax to it. She was gone from him, and that was not enough: she must be lost to him for ever and ever. Any miserable hope he might have entertained of another season renewing the rapture of this must be forgone and stoically renounced. The end of all things had come. He thought so, indeed, poor lad, and wisdom shall have no smile for his delusion. If this was, after all, but a boy and girl romance, to magnify the importance of which were to misuse one’s sense of proportion, it was a thing as intensely felt, and far more purely, than many an older passion. His life, his loneliness, his own reserved temperament had made of Brion a boy with something of a man’s heart, and it was as a man rather than as a boy he suffered. But it was as a boy that, when at last the bitter delayed sun made his appearance through the clouds, he climbed to the empty bower, and wept and wept childish tears to know his sweet love gone from it. What would be her fate, so ravished beyond the reach of his influence, besieged and persecuted, perhaps, to force her into compliance with an unnatural demand? How he hated that unknown suitor; how he despised and scorned the commercial-souled parent who could stoop to barter his own flesh and blood (for to that unwarrantable conclusion he had jumped) against some worldly consideration. In alternations of mood he would sorrow dumbly, or burst into wild imprecations over the inhuman destiny which had uplifted him only to cast him down. At first, in spite of a fact stated and verified, he would cherish some mad hope that the family had not really departed--at least that _she_ had been left behind, and that he would go to the bower one day and find her awaiting him with shining eyes and soft enamoured looks. But that dream was of brief duration: it could not survive the testimony of witnesses who knew the truth and could have no object in distorting it. And so, reconvinced of its emptiness, he would to his ravings again.