Some mornings when he awoke it seemed to him that he should die of mere exhaustion and starvation of spirit if he saw not Lucina before night.

In those days he would rather have walked over fiery plough-shares than visited any place where he had seen Lucina, and where she now was not.

He never went near the wood, where they had sat together; he would not pass even, if he could help it, the Squire's house or Miss Camilla's.

His was one of those minds for whom, when love has once come, place is only that which holds, or is vacant of, the beloved.

He was glad when the white frost came and burned out the gardens and the woodlands with arctic fires of death, for then the associations with old scenes were in a measure lost.
One Sunday after the frost, when the ground was shining stiff with it, as with silver mail, and all the trees thickened the distance as with glittering furze, he went to his woodland, and found that he could bear the sight of the place where he and Lucina had been together; its strangeness of aspect seemed to place it so far in the past.
Jerome threw up his head in the thin, sparkling air.