We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together on horseback.
For this day, then, our lessons were over, and my uncle was from home.
This was an indisputable relief, yet the fact that it was so, pained me
keenly, for I recognized in it the first of the schism. How I got through
the day, I cannot tell. I was in a dream, not all a dream of delight.
Haunted with the face I had seen, and living in the new consciousness it
had waked in me, I spent most of it in the garden, now in the glooms of
the yew-walks, and now in the smiling wilderness. It was odd, however,
that, although I was not _expected_ to be in my uncle's room at any time
but that of lessons, all the morning I had a feeling as if I ought to be
there, while yet glad that my uncle was not there.
It was late before he returned, and I went to bed. Perhaps I retired so
soon that I might not have to look into his eyes. Usually, I sat now
until he came home. I was long in getting to sleep, and then I dreamed. I
thought I was out in the storm, and the flash came which revealed the
horse and his rider, but they were both different. The horse in the dream
was black as coal, as if carved out of the night itself; and the man
upon him was the beautiful stranger whose horse I had not seen for the
garden-wall. The darkness fell, and the voice of my uncle called to me. I
waited for him in the storm with a troubled heart, for I knew he had not
seen that vision, and I could no more tell him of it, than could
Christabel tell her father what she had seen after she lay down.
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