The room was also adorned by a glass case full of stuffed birds, badly
moth-eaten, a book-case containing some battered books mostly about
fishing, and a large Visitors' Book lying on a centre-table, between a
Bradshaw and an old guide-book. Shut up, in winter, the little room would
smell intolerably close and musty. But with the windows open, and a rainy
sun streaming in, it spoke pleasantly of holidays for plain hard-working
folk, and of that "passion for the beauty flown," which distils, from the
summer hours of rest, strength for the winter to come.
Lucy had let Helena go out alone, of set purpose. For she knew, or
guessed, what Nature and Earth had done for Helena during the month they
had passed together in this mountain-land, since that night at Beechmark.
Helena had made no moan--revealed nothing. Only a certain paleness in her
bright cheek, a certain dreamy habit that Lucy had not before noticed in
her; a restlessness at night which the thin partitions of the old inn
sometimes made audible, betrayed that the youth in her was fighting its
first suffering, and fighting to win.
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