'We brought her in—nurse and I—and when she had been put comfortably on the low couch I had sent from London beforehand, and had taken some food, she was a little cheered. She made us draw her to the window of the little back sitting-room, and she lay looking out till it was almost dark. But as I foresaw, the pain of coming is more than equal to any pleasure there may be.
'Yet she would come. During those last days in London, when she would hardly speak to us, when she lay in the dark in that awful room all day, and every attempt to feed her or comfort her made her angry, I could not, for a long time, get her to say what she wished about moving, except that she would not go back to Manchester.
'Her hand-glass could not be kept from her, and one morning she cried bitterly when she saw that she could no longer so arrange her laces as to completely hide the disfigurement of the right side of the face.
'"No! I will never go back to Merton Road!" she cried, throwing down the glass; "no one shall see me!"
'But at night, after I hoped she was asleep, she sent nurse to say that she wanted to go to—Rydal!—to the same cottage by the Rotha we had stayed at on our honeymoon. Nurse said she could—she could have an invalid-carriage from door to door. Would I write for the rooms at once? And Sandy could join us there.
'So, after nine years, we are here again. The house is empty. We have our old rooms. Nothing is changed in the valley. After she was asleep, I went out along the river, keeping to a tiny path on the steep right bank till I reached a wooden bridge, and then through a green bit, fragrant with fast-springing grass and flowers, to that point beside the lake I remember so well. I left her there one day, sitting, and dabbling in the water, while I ran up Loughrigg. She was nineteen. How she tripped over the hills!
'To-night there was a faint moon. The air was cold, but quite still, and the reflections, both of the islands and of Nab Scar, seemed to sink into unfathomed depths of shadowy water. Loughrigg rose boldly to my left against the night sky; I could see the rifle-butts and the soft blackness of the great larch-plantation on the side of Silver How.
'There, to my right, was the tower of the little church, whitish against the woods, and close beside it, amid the trees, I felt the presence of Wordsworth's house, though I could not see it.
'O Poet! who wrote for me, not knowing—oh, heavenly valley!—you have but one voice; it haunts my ears:—
'Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine, too, is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.'