And he left the room abruptly, in such an anguish of grief that the mother rose and followed him.
John went to the door and locked it, almost with a sort of impatience; then came back and stood by his darling, alone. Me he never saw—no, nor anything in the world except that little face, even in death so strangely like his own. The face which had been for eleven years the joy of his heart, the very apple of his eye.
For a long time he remained gazing, in a stupor of silence; then, sinking on his knee, he stretched out his arms across the bed, with a bitter cry:
"Come back to me, my darling, my first-born! Come back to me, Muriel, my little daughter—my own little daughter!"
But thou wert with the angels, Muriel—Muriel!
CHAPTER XXIX
We went home, leaving all that was mortal of our darling sleeping at Enderley, underneath the snows.
For twelve years after then, we lived at Longfield; in such unbroken, uneventful peace, that looking back seems like looking back over a level sea, whose leagues of tiny ripples make one smooth glassy plain.
Let me recall—as the first wave that rose, ominous of change—a certain spring evening, when Mrs. Halifax and I were sitting, as was our wont, under the walnut-tree. The same old walnut-tree, hardly a bough altered, though many of its neighbours and kindred had grown from saplings into trees—even as some of us had grown from children almost into young men.