She did not look out again. The sound of the carriage-springs
was no longer audible, the bells could scarcely be heard. The
barking of dogs showed the carriage had reached the village, and
all that was left was the empty fields all round, the village in
front, and he himself isolated and apart from it all, wandering
lonely along the deserted highroad.
He glanced at the sky, expecting to find there the cloud shell he
had been admiring and taking as the symbol of the ideas and
feelings of that night. There was nothing in the sky in the
least like a shell. There, in the remote heights above, a
mysterious change had been accomplished. There was no trace of
shell, and there was stretched over fully half the sky an even
cover of tiny and ever tinier cloudlets. The sky had grown blue
and bright; and with the same softness, but with the same
remoteness, it met his questioning gaze.
"No," he said to himself, "however good that life of simplicity
and toil may be, I cannot go back to it. I love _her_."