‘Ah, Love, but a day,
And the world has changed!’
Dinah read through the first stanzas untouched. Pretty love-warblings, the cry of a happy woman’s heart,—what had they to say to her, Dinah Arbuthnot? In the last stanza of ‘By the Fireside’ her pulse gave a leap.
‘Did a woman ever—would I knew!—
Watch the man——’
Dinah went back to the window, the volume in her hand. She returned to the beginning of the poem, pored over it, line by line, stanza by stanza, in the fading light.
‘Yet this turns now to a fault—there! there!
That I do love, watch too long,
And wait too well, and weary and wear;