vereign; she had kept it in her pocket from forgetfulness, after going out to make purchases the day [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] before yesterday.
Did she lie down in the gloomy bedroom of the old inn that night with her will bent unwaveringly on the path of penitent sacrifice? The great struggles of life are not so easy as that; the great problems of life are not so clear. In the darkness of that night she saw Stephen’s face turned toward her in passionate, reproachful misery; she lived through again all the tremulous delights of his presence with her that made existence an easy floating in a stream of joy, instead of a quiet resolved endurance and effort. The love she had renounced came back upon her with a cruel charm; she felt herself opening her arms to receive it once more; and then it seemed to slip away and fade and vanish, leaving only the dying sound of a deep, thrilling voice that said, “Gone, forever gone.”
Book VII: The Final Rescue Chapter I: The Return to the Mill
Between four and five o’clock on the afternoon of the fifth day from that on which Stephen and Maggie had left St. Ogg’s, Tom Tulliver was standing on the gravel walk outside the old house at Dorlcote Mill. He was master there now; he had half fulfilled his father’s dying wish, and by years of steady self-government and energetic work he had brought himself near to the attainment of more than the old respectability which had been the proud inheritance of the Dodsons and Tullivers.
But Tom’s face, as he stood in the hot, still sunshine of that [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] summer afternoon, had no gladness, no triumph in it. His mouth wore its bitterest expression, his severe brow its hardest and deepest [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] fold, as he drew down his hat farther over his eyes to shelter them from the sun, and thrusting his hands deep into his pockets, began to walk up and down the gravel. No news of his sister had been heard since Bob Jakin had [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] come back in the steamer from Mudport, and put an end [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] to all improbable suppositions of an accident on the water by stating that he had seen her land from a vessel with Mr. Stephen Guest. Would the next news be that she was [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] married — or what? Probably that she was not married; Tom’s mind was set to the expectation of the worst that could happen — not death, but disgrace.
As he was walking with his back toward the entrance gate, and his face toward the rushing mill-stream, a tall, dark-eyed figure, that we know well, approached the gate, and paused to look at him with a fast-beating heart. Her brother was the human being of whom she had been most afraid from her childhood upward; afraid with that fear which springs in us when we love one who is inexorable, unbending, unmodifiable, with a mind that we can never mould ourselves [Ссылки могут видеть только зарегистрированные пользователи. ] upon, and yet that we cannot endure to alienate from us.
That deep-rooted fear was shaking Maggie now; but her mind was unswervingly bent on returning to her brother, as the natural refuge that had been given her. In her deep humiliation under the retrospect of her own weakness — in her anguish at the injury she had inflicte
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