"Sissy, shall I promise now? I've been thinking about it, and I've no wish on earth but to make you happy. Will it make you happier if I promise now that it shall be as you said?"
"Then I do promise: all that is mine to leave he shall have."
Sissy answered with a smile. "Kiss me," she said. And so the promise was sealed. After that the worst of the night seemed somehow to be over. Sissy slept a little, and Aunt Harriet nodded once or twice in the easy-chair. Starting into wakefulness after one of these moments, she saw the outline of the window faintly defined in gray, and thanked God that the dawn had come.
Mr. Hardwicke, not knowing Percival Thorne's precise address, had telegraphed to Godfrey Hammond, begging him to forward the message without delay. A couple of days earlier Hammond had suddenly taken it into his head that he was tired of being in town and would go away somewhere. In a sort of whimsical amusement at his own mood he decided that the Land's End ought to suit a misanthrope, and promptly took a ticket for Penzance as a considerable step in the right direction.
It made no difference to Percival, for Hammond had left full directions with a trustworthy servant in case any letters should come for Mr. Thorne, and the man sent the message on to Brenthill at once. But it made a difference to Hammond himself. When Hardwicke despatched the telegram to his address in town Godfrey lay on the turf at the Lizard Head, gazing southward across the sunlit sea, while the seabirds screamed and the white waves broke on the jagged rocks far below.
But with Percival there was no delay. The message found him in Bellevue street, though he did not return there immediately after his parting with Judith. He wanted the open air, the sky overhead, movement and liberty to calm the joyful tumult in heart and brain. He hastened to the nearest point whence he could look over trees and fields. The prospect was not very beautiful. The trees were few--some cropped willows by a mud-banked rivulet and a group or two of gaunt and melancholy elms. And the fields had a trodden, suburban aspect, which made it hardly needful to stick up boards describing them as eligible building-ground. Yet there was grass, such as it was, and daisies sprinkled here and there, and soft cloud-shadows gliding over it. Percival's unreal and fantastic dream had perished suddenly when Judith put her hand in his. Now, as he walked across these meadows, he saw a new vision, that dream of noble, simple poverty, which, if it could but be realized, would be the fairest of all.