Well, the tumultuous time passed, and was succeeded in due course by a sad and settled resignation. The habit of sorrow comes, like other habits, to fit the more easily the longer it is worn. There was reached a day of half sweet, half melancholy reveries, when past joys began to assume an air of dim peacefulness, more of regret than of anguish. Old looks, old tones took on a mystic glamour, like happy things remembered from a dream. Most of all, queerly enough, there lingered in the boy’s mind a thought, humorously pathetic, of those quaint misterms which had issued so funnily from the girl’s lips. He put them down, young learned clerk that he was, to a faulty education; but he would not have his memory of his Joan without them. They seemed an essential part of the sweet thing she was. And so, for what she had been and remained, he locked his dream away in his breast, only to be taken out and sorrowed over in rare relapses on emotion, but otherwise quietly possessed as a gift of ancient beauty. Always it abode with him, and was not the less there because other interests and desires, fruit of his growing life, appeared to absorb him. But he never forgot his early love, or forgot that he had dedicated his service, true knight and champion, to her honour and renown. That consciousness, though it ceased in time to be insistent, kept him brave and pure. CHAPTER XIV. AN EMOTION AND A DISCOVERY It happened timely that there arrived from London at this pass that great consignment of goods and furniture before referred to. The unloading and distribution of the stuff, for all the boy’s professed repudiation of any interest in it, came presently, however, irresistibly to engage his curiosity, and he won a certain wintry distraction from his own thoughts by directing the placing of the multifarious items in the spots most fancied by his sense of fitness or caprice. He showed a good deal of captiousness in the matter, being in no mood to consider other people’s feelings when his own had been so rasped and wounded; but his obedient henchmen, influenced, perhaps--at least in the Cook’s case--by their sympathy with something loosely approximating the truth, submitted meekly to his tyranny, and lugged heavy objects at his bidding into all sorts of inconvenient nooks and eyries. And, not until every piece was disposed to their young despot’s liking, were they permitted to relax their efforts and conclude their task fulfilled; when he thanked and praised them so sweetly, with a hint of remorse for his own inconsiderateness, that they forgave him offhand, and withdrew luminously to submit their bruised thumbs and abraded fingers to the ministrations of Mrs Harlock.