Cool visions of the pleasant English home he had quitted for
ever; the shadows and the calm of his church, where the sunshine slanted
in through narrow windows made green with ivy-leaves; the rustling of
leaves in the elm-trees on his lawn in the soft low wind of a summer's
evening; the deep grassy glades of thick woods, where he had loved to
walk; the murmuring and tinkling of hidden brooks--all these flitted
across his clouded mind as he sat speechless, with his throbbing head
resting upon his hands. Often his wife crouched beside him, herself
silent, thinking sadly how he was brooding over all the wrong and injury
she had done him, yet fearing in her humiliation to ask him if it were
so. Her repentance was very deep and real, her love for him very true.
Yet she dreaded the hour when she must face temptation again. She could
not even bear to think of it.
But shortly after they had passed the southern tropic, as they neared
the Cape, the climate changed suddenly, with so swift an alteration that
from sultry heat of a torrid summer they plunged almost directly into
the biting cold of winter.
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