Without warning, a throb of memory assailed her: was it only a month ago she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet Ishmael in the field? Her fingers shook a little as she took a few blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their vase and laid them tentatively against her gown. They harmonised to perfection, but Blanche, after a moment's hesitation, flung them down.
"I'll buy some roses in Exeter," she thought; "they'll look more suitable than hedge-flowers." It was her definite rejection of the country and all it stood for; but on a gust of sentiment she picked up the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again--her last tribute to the memory of Ishmael.
During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing him ever again feeling with such acuteness. From time to time he fell into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness again, as insistent as before. He fought his lassitude of spirit as stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result, the opposition probably only making both last the longer. He would doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase. But partly from a stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his mistress have passed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed on at Cloom. At Cloom--where there was no evading the thought of her amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow seemed as though it blew from her. If he had left he would have had to take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still there.
There was a long time when it suddenly seemed to him as though she must repent, as though he could not be suffering so and she not share it, as though any post might bring a letter and any moment show her figure pausing at the gate. He learnt during that phase what poignancy is held by the cry of the wisest of men--that "hope deferred maketh the heart sick." During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in which it all the time deceitfully gathered itself together for the next onslaught.