He closed his eyes. It was
as though a shipwreck was going on around him. His dream was being
broken up into pieces. The girl with the fair hair was passing into the
shadows from which she had come. She called to him across the lawn as
he hurried away, softly at first and then insistently. But Burton did
not return. He spent his night upon the Common.
CHAPTER XIX
A BAD HALF-HOUR
Burton slept that night under a gorse bush. He was no sooner alone on
the great unlit Common with its vast sense of spaciousness, its cool
silence, its splendid dome of starlit sky, than all his anger and
disappointment seemed to pass away. The white, threatening faces of the
professor and Mr. Bomford no longer haunted him. Even the memory of
Edith herself tugged no longer at his heartstrings. He slept almost
like a child, and awoke to look out upon a million points of sunlight
sparkling in the dewdrops. A delicious west wind was blowing. Little
piled-up masses of white cloud had been scattered across the blue sky.
Even the gorse bushes creaked and quivered. The fir trees in a little
spinney close at hand were twisted into all manners of shapes. Burton
listened to their music for a few minutes, and exchanged civilities with
a dapple-breasted thrush seated on a clump of heather a few yards away.
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