All
about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic
yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and
contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal
solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions,
had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier
crab that had found a shell to his mind, he gazed through the
yawning mouth of the cavern at the turmoil of the rising tide, as
it rushed straight towards him through a low jagged channel in the
rocks. But straight with the tide came the wind, blowing right into
the cave; and finding it keener than pleasant, he turned and went
farther in. After a steep ascent some little way, the cavern took
a sharp turn to one side, where not a breath of wind, not a glimmer
of light, reached, and there he sat down upon a stone, and fell a
thinking.
He must face the lie out, and he must accept any mother God had
given him: but with such a mother as Mrs Stewart, and without Mr
Graham, how was he to endure the altered looks of his old friends?
Faces indifferent before, had grown suddenly dear to him; and
opinions he would have thought valueless once, had become golden in
his eyes. Had he been such as to deserve their reproaches, he would
doubtless have steeled himself to despise them; but his innocence
bound him to the very people who judged him guilty. And there was
that awful certainty slowly but steadily drawing nearer--that
period of vacant anguish, in which Lady Florimel must vanish from
his sight, and the splendour of his life go with her, to return no
more.
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