Patience was all the service Fate asked of him, and he gave that service blithely, depending upon the reward that soon now would be his own.

Indeed, the year drew near its close; and ere another winter should come round Penarrow House would own a mistress.

That to him seemed as inevitable as the season itself.
And yet for all his supreme confidence, for all his patience and the happiness he culled from it, there were moments when he seemed oppressed by some elusive sense of overhanging doom, by some subconsciousness of an evil in the womb of Destiny.

Did he challenge his oppression, did he seek to translate it into terms of reason, he found nothing upon which his wits could fasten--and he came ever to conclude that it was his very happiness by its excessiveness that was oppressing him, giving him at times that sense of premonitory weight about the heart as if to check its joyous soarings.
One day, a week from Christmas, he had occasion to ride to Helston on some trifling affair.

For half a week a blizzard had whirled about the coast, and he had been kept chafing indoors what time layer upon layer of snow was spread upon the countryside.