He only realized that night how desperate his need had been. He lay in his berth on board a train for the city—while back at his “open-camp” a wild blizzard was raging, and the thermometer stood at forty degrees below zero. But Thyrsis was warm and comfortable; and also he was brown and rugged, once more full of health and eagerness for life. All night he listened to the pounding of the flying train; and fast as the music of it went, it was not fast enough for his imagination. It seemed as if the rails were speaking—saying to him, over and over and over again, “Ethelynda Lewis! Ethelynda Lewis! Ethelynda Lewis!”
BOOK X. THE END OF THE TETHER
They sat still watching upon the hill-top, drinking in the scent of the clover.
“Ah, if only we might have come back here!” she sighed. “If only tee had never had to leave!”
“That way lies unhappiness” he said.
“Perhaps,” she answered; and then quoted—
‘Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour
In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp’d hill!
Who, if not I, for questing here hath power?”
“I wonder,” said he, “if the poet put as much into these stanzas as we find in them!”