‘I have read somewhere that there is no real gloom but what people raise for themselves.’
‘True. Gloom is in sin, not sorrow. Yes, there would be no comfort if I were not sure that if aught of grief or pain should come to you through me, it will not, cannot really hurt you, my Amy.’
‘No, unless by my own fault, and you will help me to meet it. Hark! was that a nightingale?’
‘Yes, the first! How beautiful! There—don’t you see it? Look on that hazel, you may see its throat moving. Well!’ when they had listened for a long time,—‘after all, that creature and the sea will hardly let one speak of gloom, even in this world, to say nothing of other things.
‘The sea! I am glad I have never seen it, because now you will show it to me for the first time.’
‘You will never, can never imagine it, Amy! and he sung,—
‘With all tones of waters blending,
Glorious is the breaking deep,
Glorious, beauteous, without ending,
Songs of ocean never sleep.’
A silence followed, only broken by the notes of the birds, and presently by the strokes of the great clock. Guy looked at his watch.
‘Eleven, Amy! I must go to my reading, or you will have to be very much ashamed of me.’
For, after the first few days, Guy had returned to study regularly every day. He said it was a matter of necessity, not at all of merit, for though he did not mean to try for honours, Amy must not marry a plucked man. His whole career at Oxford had been such a struggle with the disadvantages of his education, that all his diligence had, he thought, hardly raised him to a level with his contemporaries. Moreover, courtship was not the best preparation for the schools, so that though he knew he had done his best, he expected no more than to pass respectably, and told Amy it was very good of her to be contented with a dunce, whereat she laughed merrily. But she knew him too well to try to keep him lingering in the April sunshine, and in they went, Guy to his Greek, and Amy to her mother. Charlotte’s lessons had been in abeyance, or turned over to Laura of late, and Mrs. Edmonstone and her dressing-room were always ready for the confidences of the family, who sought her there in turn—all but one, and that the one whose need was the sorest.