It was long after the gray vaporous morning stole on the hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She wondered through the long hours of it, whether now, like other women, she had had her story, passed through her one supreme moment, and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she knew in the neighborhood with a new and curious pity. Had any of them, too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up widowed indeed?
All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride in her own spiritual strength. 'It was not mine,' she would have said with perfect sincerity, 'but God's.' Still, whatever its source, it had been there at command, and the reflection carried with it a sad sense of security. It was as though a soldier after his first skirmish should congratulate himself on being bullet-proof.
To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the thought that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again probably many times. The period of his original invitation had been warmly extended by the Thornburghs. She believed he meant to stay another week or ten days in the valley. But in the spiritual exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to any conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands clasped on her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like those of some old sepulchral monument.
The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and the barometer with abnormal interest. The day was sunless and lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, with a hypocritical assumption of the practical man, that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to picnic on the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar's wife. She was all sighs and flightiness. She 'supposed they could go,' and 'didn't, see what good it would do them;' she had twenty different views, and all of them more or less mixed up with pettishness, as to the best place for a picnic on a gray day; and at last she grew so difficult that Robert suspected something desperately wrong with the household, and withdrew lest male guests might be in the way. T hen she pursued him into the study and thrust a _Spectator_ into his hands, begging him to convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously, with many sighs, her cap much askew. Robert could, have kissed her, curls and all, one moment for suggesting the errand, and the next could almost have signed her committal to the county lunatic asylum with a clear conscience. What an extraordinary person it was!