Since he had
gone, months before, there had been little news; but there had been much
public anxiety; and she knew only too well that there had been
'pourparlers' with foreign ministers, from which no action came
safe-guarding David.
Many a human being has realised the apathy, the partial paralysis of the
will, succeeding a great struggle, which has exhausted the vital forces.
Many a general who has fought a desperate and victorious fight after a
long campaign, and amid all the anxieties and miseries of war, has failed
to follow up his advantage, from a sudden lesion of the power for action
in him. He has stepped from the iron routine of daily effort into a
sudden freedom, and his faculties have failed him, the iron of his will
has vanished. So it was with Hylda. She waited for she knew not what. Was
it some dim hope that Eglington might see the right as she saw it? That
he might realise how unreal was this life they were living, outwardly
peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly a place of
tears. How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and the hours
when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning, as one lost
on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise! Night after
night at a certain hour--the hour when she went to bed at last after that
poignant revelation to Eglington--she wept, as she had wept then,
heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion, loneliness; tears for
the bitter pity of it all; for the wasting and wasted opportunities; for
the common aim never understood or planned together; for the precious
hours lived in an air of artificial happiness and social excitement; for
a perfect understanding missed; for the touch which no longer thrilled.
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