What was there to know?
what to require?
Now that the main line of her route through life had been surveyed and carefully laid out, what was there more for her in life than to set out upon her progress?
It was her own road.

Presumptive leader already, logical leader from the day she married--leader, in fact, when the ukase, her future legacy, so decreed; it was a royal road laid out for her through the gardens and pleasant places; a road for her alone, and over it she had chosen to pass.

What more was there to desire?
From the going of Siward, all that he had aroused in her of love, of intelligence, of wholesome desire and sane curiosity--the intellectual restlessness, the capacity for passion, the renaissance of the simpler innocence--had subsided into the laissez faire of dull quiescence.

If in her he had sown, imprudently, subtle, impulsive, unworldly ideas, flowering into sudden brilliancy in the quick magic of his companionship, now those flowers were dead under the inexorable winter of her ambition, where all such things lay; her lonely childhood, with its dimmed visions of mother-love ineffable; the strange splendour of the dreams haunting her adolescence--pageants of bravery and the glitter of the cross, altars of self-denial and pure intent, service and sacrifice and the scorn of wrong; and sometimes, seen dimly with enraptured eyes through dissolving mists--the man! glimmering for an instant, then fading, resolved into the starry void which fashioned him.
Riding there, head bent, her pulses timing the slow pacing of her horse, she presently became aware, without looking up, that Quarrier was watching her.

Dreams vanished.