.
.The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful,
perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering.
It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy
soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal. The river
itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies,
flowed not like the streams in Blackmore. Those were slow, silent, often
turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the incautious wader might
sink and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were clear as the pure river
of Life shown to the Evangelist, rabid as the shadow of a cloud, with
pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long. There the water-flower
was the lily; the crowfoot here.
. .Either the change in the quality of the
air from heavy to light, or the sense of being amid new scenes where there
were no invidious eyes upon her, set up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes
mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her
as she bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant
voice in every breeze, and in every bird’s note seemed to lurk a joy.
.
.Her face was latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually
fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts
were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and
tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her more
perfect beauty accorded with her less elevated mood; her more intense
mood with her less perfect beauty. It was her best face physically that
was now set against the south wind.
