By and by, when the spring returned, some of his old strength and vigor came back, and he was able to join personally in the search, when a new zest and excitement seemed added to his life; and in the ardor of the chase he learned to forget Margaret and the shadows of a too sorrowful past.
When the sweet face of his Wee Wifie seemed to lure him on with the sad Undine eyes that he remembered so well; when, with the contrariety of man ever eager for the unattainable, he began to long more and more to see her; when his anger revived, and impatience with it. And, though he hardly owned it to himself, both anger and impatience were born of love.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
VANITAS VANITATIS.
And is there in God’s world so drear a place,
Where the loud bitter cry is raised in vain;
Where tears of penance come too late for grace,
As on the uprooted flower the genial rain.
Keble.
St. Luke’s little summer was over, the ripe golden days that October binds in her sheaf, the richest and rarest of the year’s harvest, had been followed by chill fogs—dull sullen days—during which flaring gas-lights burned in Mrs. Watkins’s shop even at noonday, and Fern’s busy fingers, never willingly idle, worked by the light of a lamp long before the muffin boy and milkman made their afternoon rounds in the Elysian Fields.
Anything further removed from the typical idea of the Elysian Fields could scarcely be imagined than on such an afternoon. It was difficult, even for a light-hearted person, to maintain a uniform cheerfulness where damp exuded everywhere, and the moist thick air seemed to close round one in vaporous folds. Somewhere, no doubt, the sun was shining, and might possibly shine again; but it was hard to realize it—hard to maintain outward or inward geniality under such depressing circumstances.