ABSTRACT
Aglionby, casting one last look after Rhoda’s figure as it disappeared, turned his horse’s head, and drove homewards, dreamily. Not a fortnight – not one short fourteen days had elapsed since he had been summoned hither – and how much had taken place since! He could not have believed, had anyone told him earlier, that he had so much flexibility in his character as to be susceptible of undergoing the change which certainly had taken place in him during that short time. In looking back upon his Irkford life, it appeared like an existence which he had led, say ten years ago, and from which he was for evera severed. The men and women who had moved and lived in it, trooped by, in his mind, like figures in a dream; so much so, indeed, that he presently dismissed them as one does dismiss a recollected dream from his head, and his thoughts reverted to the present; went back to the parlour at Yoresett House, to Mrs. Conisbrough’s figure reclining in her easy-chair, and to the figures of his three ‘cousins.’ All over again, and keenly as ever, he felt the pain and mortification he had experienced from Judith’s fiat as to their future terms.
