'Oh, I
don't know what to do!'
'Stay quietly with me. We shall soon see the dawn now. Look, the
morning star is lovely over there. The clouds have completely
cleared off whilst you have been sleeping. What have you been
dreaming of?'
'A woman in our parish.'
'Don't you like her?'
'I don't. She doesn't like me. Where are we?'
'About south of the Exe.'
Knight said no more on the words of her dream. They watched the
sky till Elfride grew calm, and the dawn appeared. It was mere
wan lightness first. Then the wind blew in a changed spirit, and
died away to a zephyr. The star dissolved into the day.
'That's how I should like to die,' said Elfride, rising from her
seat and leaning over the bulwark to watch the star's last
expiring gleam.
'As the lines say,' Knight replied----
'"To set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darken'd west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
But melts away into the light of heaven."'
'Oh, other people have thought the same thing, have they? That's
always the case with my originalities--they are original to nobody
but myself.'
'Not only the case with yours. When I was a young hand at
reviewing I used to find that a frightful pitfall--dilating upon
subjects I met with, which were novelties to me, and finding
afterwards they had been exhausted by the thinking world when I
was in pinafores.
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