CHAPTER XXXVIII.
UNEARTHED.
The circumstance of circumstance is timing and placing. When a man meets his accurate mate, society begins, and life is delicious.—Emerson.
Be not amazed at life; ’tis still
The mode of God with His elect
Their hopes exactly to fulfil
In times and ways they least expect.
Coventry Patmore.
The romance of the novelist and the startling incident of melodrama are colourless and insignificant in comparison with the events of real life. Every day things happen around us which would appear far-fetched and absurd if transferred to the pages of a novel. We go to our peaceful slumbers at night little reckoning of the letter lying at the post-office close by which at breakfast-time will have destroyed the work of our lives, and given us a heart wound no time can heal. We sit down to dinner in weariness with the common-place monotony of our existence which the telegraph boy, already on his way to us, will startle into most unseemly agitation. We wander along Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the Strand, wondering why the stream of life in the world’s chief artery so little affects our pulses, and we meet the man who with a word changes the current of our existence in an instant.
Mildred Lee went to her bed full of thought, and wondered how she was to carry out the purposes which she had often pondered, with only half-opened eyes seeing the great work which lay before her, little dreaming that before another bedtime she would have had all her fluid purposes cast in the mould of fate, or rather set, by the hand of Providence, in a sharply defined form which was to make her name high and honourable amongst men. She went to rest that Granada night a purposeless dreamer of unbodied hopes. Next day was to introduce her to a higher phase of thought. Hopes to-night, dreams to-night; to-morrow an opening in the mist, as one sees from a high mountain in a rift of the fog, the panorama sun-bathed at one’s feet.