The garden outside grew dark. She heard Farrell say 'It's too cold for you--you must come in,' and she watched Nelly enter the house in front of him--turning her head back to answer something he said to her. Even through the dusk Bridget was conscious of her sister's beauty. She did not envy it in the least. It was Nelly's capital--Nelly's opportunity. Let her use it for them both. Bridget would be well satisfied to gather up the crumbs from her rich sister's table.
Then from the dream, she came back with chill and desperation--to reality. The letter in her pocket--the journey before her--she pondered alternatives. What was she to do in this case--or in that? Everything might be at stake--everything was at stake--her life and Nelly's--
The voices from the parlour below came up to her. She heard the crackling of a newly lighted fire--Farrell reading aloud--and Nelly's gentle laughter. She pictured the scene; the two on either side of the fire, with Nelly's mourning, her plain widow's dress, as the symbol--in Nelly's eyes--of what divided her from Farrell, or any other suitor, and made it possible to be his friend without fear. Bridget knew that Nelly so regarded it. But that of course was just Nelly's foolish way of looking at things. It was only a question of time.
And meanwhile the widow's dress had quite other meanings for Bridget. She pondered long in the dark, till the supper bell rang.
At supper, her silence embarrassed and infected her companions, and Farrell, finding it impossible to get another tête-à-tête with Nelly, took his leave early. He must be up almost with the dawn so as to get to Carton by nine o'clock.
Out of a stormy heaven the moon was breaking as he walked back to his cottage. The solitude of the mountain ways, the freshness of the rain-washed air, and the sweetness of his hour with Nelly, after the bustle of the week, the arrivals and departures, the endless business, of a great hospital:--he was conscious of them all, intensely conscious, as parts of a single, delightful whole to which he had looked forward for days. And yet he was restless and far from happy. He wandered about the mountain roads for a long time--watching the moon as it rose above the sharp steep of Loughrigg and sent long streamers of light down the Elterwater valley, and up the great knees of the Pikes. The owls hooted in the oak-woods, and the sound of water--the Brathay rushing over the Skelwith rocks, and all the little becks in fell and field, near and far--murmured through the night air, and made earth-music to the fells. Farrell had much of the poet in him; and the mountains and their life were dear to him. But he was rapidly passing into the stage when a man over-mastered by his personal desires is no longer open to the soothing of nature. He had recently had a long and confidential talk with his lawyer at Carlisle, who was also his friend, and had informed himself minutely about the state of the law. Seven years!--unless, of her own free will, she took the infinitesimal risk of marriage before the period was up.