Everything pleased her and responded to the mood she was in. There was a “distant dearness” in the hills that bowered in this happy valley, “a secret sweetness in the stream” that flowed to a place two miles off, where, indeed, she would fain have been, but that would come in time. She was full of a great peace. She thought she could almost feel the wrinkles of ennui and harassment slowly fading out of her forehead, and the tangle of rebellious nerves that had driven her away from her home smoothing themselves out, as she sat there, and, like Wordsworth’s Lucy, allowed “beauty born of murmuring sound to pass into her face.” True to herself, she immediately forced a personal application, and reduced Nature into subserviency to the Human Interest. With a well pointed tag of verse she pointed and emphasized the sensations of Phœbe Elles now become the motive and main pivot of the most beautiful landscape in the world.
For the moment with her the health motive reigned supreme. She was no longer a runaway wife, she was an invalid profiting by change of air. Nothing was going to happen; let the world stand still while she was happy for the first time in her life. Surely she had a right to a little happiness!
She stayed there until the one red-trunked fir tree, up there on the heights by Mortham Peel, caught and glowed in the sunset light, and the damp mists began to rise in their proportion from this enormous area of rank foliage that engendered them. The fisherman put up his rod and went home. The doves cooed in a continuous monotone. Mrs. Elles knew well enough by all these signs that it was getting late. As she loitered slowly home, she could hear on the other side of the high Park wall the noisy passage of char-à-bancs, and vans full of jovial people, whose hoarsely shouted refrain of “She’s a jolly good fellow!” testified to their appreciation of Mrs. Watson’s thirty pies and cheerful welcome. Peace was evidently restored, and Mr. Rivers would have had his dinner quietly and be done by the time she got back. She was not at all hungry; she would have a glass of milk and a sandwich in her room. She was a woman who habitually took strong coffee twice a day.
The party of trippers had gone, silence reigned, but the open door of the meeting room, as she crossed the hall on her way in, showed a wild and hideous scene of tea-stained table-cloths and broken meats.