"I don't care about that. Hear the truth from me. If he were as ugly and poor as Mary Browne's Peter, I should marry him all the same, just because I love him!"
"Oh, Hermia, I am so glad," says Olga. "After all what is there in the whole wide world so sweet as love? And as for Rossmoyne,—why, he couldn't make a tender speech to save his life as it should be made; whilst Ulic—oh he's charming!"
CHAPTER XXXI.
How Monica's heart fails her; and how at last Hope (whose name is Brian) comes back to her through the quivering moonlight.
And now night has fallen at last upon this long day. A gentle wind is shivering through the elms; a glorious moon has risen in all its beauty, and stands in "heaven's wide, pathless way," as though conscious of its grandeur, yet sad for the sorrows of the seething earth beneath. Now clear, now resplendent she shines, and now through a tremulous mist shows her pure face, and again for a space is hidden,
"As if her head she bow'd
Stooping through a fleecy cloud."
Miss Priscilla, with a sense of now-found dignity upon her, has gone early to bed. Miss Penelope has followed suit. Terence, in the privacy of his own room, is rubbing a dirty oily flannel on the bright barrels of his beloved gun, long since made over to him as a gift by Brian.
Kit is sitting on the wide, old-fashioned window-seat in Monica's room at her sister's feet, and with her thin little arms twined lovingly round her. She is sleepy enough, poor child, but cannot bear to desert Monica, who is strangely wakeful and rather silent and distraite. For ever since the morning when he had come to carry Miss Priscilla to Coole, Brian has been absent from her; not once has he come to her; and a sense of chill and fear, as strong as it is foolish, is [overpowering] her.
She rouses herself now with a little nervous quiver that seems to run through all her veins and lets her hand fall on Kit's drooping head.