She reached the mill and stood and listened towards the stream and the
waterfall. She came here often. The scene quieted her in moods of
restlessness which came from a feeling that her mission was interrupted,
that half her life's work had been suddenly taken from her. When David
went, her life had seemed to shrivel; for with him she had developed as
he had developed; and when her busy care of him was withdrawn, she had
felt a sort of paralysis which, in a sense, had never left her. Then
suitors had come--the soldier from Shipley Wood, the lord of Axwood
Manor, and others, and, in a way, a new sense was born in her, though she
was alive to the fact that the fifteen thousand pounds inherited from her
Uncle Benn had served to warm the air about her into a wider circle. Yet
it was neither to soldier, nor squire, nor civil engineer, nor surgeon
that the new sense stirring in her was due. The spring was too far
beneath to be found by them.
When, at last, she raised her head, Lord Eglington was in the path,
looking at her with a half-smile.
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