CHAPTER XXXIII
"SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN!"
Wednesday dawned; an ideal First of May: Garth was in the garden before breakfast. Jane heard him singing, as he passed beneath her window.
"It is not mine to sing the stately grace, The great soul beaming in my lady's face."
She leaned out.
He was walking below in the freshest of white flannels; his step so light and elastic; his every movement so lithe and graceful; the only sign of his blindness the Malacca cane he held in his hand, with which he occasionally touched the grass border, or the wall of the house. She could only see the top of his dark head. It might have been on the terrace at Shenstone, three years before. She longed to call from the window; "Darling—my Darling! Good morning! God bless you to-day."
Ah what would to-day bring forth;—the day when her full confession, and explanation, and plea for pardon, would reach him? He was such a boy in many ways; so light-hearted, loving, artistic, poetic, irrepressible; ever young, in spite of his great affliction. But where his manhood was concerned; his love; his right of choice and of decision; of maintaining a fairly-formed opinion, and setting aside the less competent judgment of others; she knew him rigid, inflexible. His very pain seemed to cool him, from the molten lover, to the bar of steel.
As Jane knelt at her window that morning, she had not the least idea whether the evening would find her travelling to Aberdeen, to take the night mail south; or at home forever in the heaven of Garth's love.
And down below he passed again, still singing:
"But mine it is to follow in her train;
Do her behests in pleasure or in pain;
Burn at her altar love's sweet frankincense,
And worship her in distant reverence."