Lucy was at the other side of the table, also working, but, as the lamplight fell upon her face, Alleyne could see that it was unruffled and full of content.
He sighed as he turned away, and thought of the past, when his thoughts went solely to his absorbing work—when this strange attraction, as he termed it, had not come upon him and drawn him, as it were, out of his course.
Only a short time back, and he went on in his matter-of-fact, mundane orbit, slowly working out problems, sometimes failing, but always returning to the task with the same calm peaceful serenity of spirit, waiting patiently for the triumph of science that sooner or later came for his reward.
How calm and unruffled all this had been. No fever of the soul, no tempest of spirit to disturb the even surface of his life. But now all was changed. They had torn him amongst them from the happy, placid life, to give him rage, and bitterness and pain.
His brow grew rugged and his hands clenched as he walked rapidly out on to the wild heath, heedless of the bushes and the inequalities of the ground, until he fell heavily, and leaped up again, to turn back. Then, giving up the wide waste of moor which he had instinctively chosen as being in accord with his frame of mind, he made straight for the next desolate spot, where it seemed to him that he could be alone with his thoughts, and perhaps school them into subjection.
“Cool down this madness,” he once said aloud, laughing bitterly the while; and the sound of his strange voice made him start and hurry on along the shady lane, as if to escape from the unseen monitor who had reminded him of his suffering.
“Yes, it is madness,” he muttered, “I could not have believed it true. But, discipline, patience, I shall conquer yet.”
He walked on, with the beads of perspiration coming softly out upon his brow; then, from being like a fine dew, they began to join one with the other, till they stood out in great drops unheeded, as he went swiftly on, and almost blindly at last turned rapidly up the steep ascent, climbing at times, and avoiding the pine trunks by a kind of blind instinct. He toiled on farther and farther, till he stood at the highest part of the great natural temple, with its windswept roof hidden in the darkness overhead, and two huge pines bending over to each other, like the sides of some huge east window, at the precipitous broken edge of the hill. Through this he could look straight away over the intervening billowy estate, to where Brackley Hall stood surrounded by trees, and with its lights shining softly against a vast background of darkness.
And now as he rested a hand upon a trunk, his vivid imagination pictured Glynne as being there, behind one or other of the softly-illumined panes.
Here he stopped and stood motionless for a time, gazing straight before him through the dimly-seen vista of the trunks, breathing in the soft, cool night air, dry and invigorating at that height. All was so still and silent, that, obeying his blind instinct, he seemed to have come there to find calmness and repose.