Was the summer a
lie?
Not so. The winter restrains, that the summer may have the needful
time to do its work well; for the winter is but the sleep of summer.
Now in the winter of his discontent, and in Nature finding no help,
Robert was driven inwards--into his garret, into his soul. There,
the door of his paradise being walled up, he began, vaguely,
blindly, to knock against other doors--sometimes against stone-walls
and rocks, taking them for doors--as travel-worn, and hence
brain-sick men have done in a desert of mountains. A door, out or
in, he must find, or perish.
It fell, too, that Miss St. John went to visit some friends who
lived in a coast town twenty miles off; and a season of heavy snow
followed by frost setting in, she was absent for six weeks, during
which time, without a single care to trouble him from without,
Robert was in the very desert of desolation. His spirits sank
fearfully. He would pass his old music-master in the street with
scarce a recognition, as if the bond of their relation had been
utterly broken, had vanished in the smoke of the martyred violin,
and all their affection had gone into the dust-heap of the past.
Dooble Sanny's character did not improve. He took more and more
whisky, his bouts of drinking alternating as before with fits of
hopeless repentance. His work was more neglected than ever, and his
wife having no money to spend even upon necessaries, applied in
desperation to her husband's bottle for comfort.
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