The earth this year had been prodigally bountiful, and now
was the supreme moment of her bounty. In the poorest spots the
hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked
underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their
auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers in a fruit-
market. In all this proud show some kernels were unsound as her
own situation, and she wondered if there were one world in the
universe where the fruit had no worm, and marriage no sorrow.
Herr Tannhauser still moved on, his plodding steed rendering him
distinctly visible yet. Could she have heard Fitzpiers's voice at
that moment she would have found him murmuring--
"...Towards the loadstar of my one desire
I flitted, even as a dizzy moth in the owlet light."
But he was a silent spectacle to her now. Soon he rose out of the
valley, and skirted a high plateau of the chalk formation on his
right, which rested abruptly upon the fruity district of loamy
clay, the character and herbage of the two formations being so
distinct that the calcareous upland appeared but as a deposit of a
few years' antiquity upon the level vale.
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