The reserved style of this letter, so different from the random shots of the present day, when young men and maidens seem to think the form of a telegram the most appropriate way of expressing their thoughts, may provoke a smile, and be pronounced priggish and formal. But in Joyce's eyes it was a perfect letter, and she felt it to be a support and comfort to her in her loneliness. Words which come from the heart seldom miss their aim; and Joyce felt that, underlying those carefully written lines, there was the certainty that if her promise to him was fulfilled, and that she thought, even in her sorrow, of him continually, _he_, on his part, did not forget her.
In the simplicity of her young heart, she had never dreamed that Gilbert could really care for her, and his long silence had made her think of him only as of someone who had passed out of her life, and was to be in future but a memory. Now the fluttering hope became almost a certainty, and she repeated to herself many times that evening, as a bird repeats its song over and over with the same rapture of content--
"I bear you ever in my mind, and the time may come, _will_ come, when I will beg you to hear more from me than I dare to say now, and grant me a very earnest petition."
"The time _will_ come--the time _will_ come, and, meanwhile, I can wait," she thought. "Yes, the time will come, and I can wait."
There are exceptions to every rule, and this applies to cities as well as to individuals. The meek man may be excited to fierce anger, the quietest and most undemonstrative, may suddenly be moved to enthusiasm. So with Wells, that little city of peace, under the Mendips; had anyone visited it for the first time on the fifth of November, in the year of grace eighteen hundred and twenty-four, they must have been struck by the uproar and confusion which reigned in the usually quiet streets.
Although Mrs. Arundel had been warned by her courteous host, the Bishop, not to be alarmed if the sound of a tumultuous crowd should even reach the seclusion of the palace itself, neither he nor she were at all prepared for the hubbub and uproar, which, beginning before the sun was well above the horizon, lasted till midnight, and, indeed, into the early hours of the next day.
