Page:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (emended first edition), Volume 3.djvu/303

Rh he had had in preventing our union, by omitting to help us, if not by actually plotting against us—I exonerated him from that charge, now, and deeply lamented my former ungenerous suspicions; but he had wronged us, still—I hoped, I trusted that he had. He had not attempted to check the course of our love by actually damming up the streams in their passage, but he had passively watched the two currents wandering through life's arid wilderness, declining to clear away the obstructions that divided them, and secretly hoping that both would lose themselves in the sand before they could be joined in one. And meantime, he had been quietly proceeding with his own affairs: perhaps his heart and head had been so full of his fair lady that he had had but little thought to spare for others. Doubtless he had made his first acquaintance with her—his first intimate acquaintance at least—during his three months' sojourn at F, for I now recollected that he had once casually let fall an