Letty was thinking of Tom--what else was there of her own to do?-
-thinking like a child, looking up into the cloud-flecked sky,
and thinking Tom was somewhere there, though she could not see
him: she must be good and patient, that she might go up to him,
as he could not come down to her--if he could, he would have come
long ago! All the enchantment of the first days of her love had
come back upon the young widow; all the ill that had crept in
between had failed from out her memory, as the false notes in
music melt in the air that carries the true ones across ravine
and river, meadow and grove, to the listening ear. Letty lived in
a dream of her husband--in heaven, "yet not from her"--such a
dream of bliss and hope as in itself went far to make up for all
her sorrows.
She was sitting with her back toward the tree and her face to
Thornwick, and yet she did not see Godfrey till he was within a
few yards of her. She smiled, expecting his kind greeting, but
was startled to hear from behind her instead the voice of a lady
greeting him. She turned her head involuntarily: there was the
head of Sepia rising above the breach in the ha-ha, and Godfrey
had turned aside and run to give her his hand.
Now Letty knew Sepia by sight, from the evening she had spent at
the old hall; more of her she knew nothing. From the mind of Tom,
in his illness, her baleful influence had vanished like an evil
dream, and Mary had not thought it necessary to let him know how
falsely, contemptuously, and contemptibly, she had behaved toward
him.
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