I groaned in sheer wretchedness over the destruction of all my dearest
plans and hopes. If the Bow Street runners had come into the plantation
just as I had completed the rifling of the desk I think I should have
let them take me without making the slightest effort at escape. As it
was, no living soul appeared within sight of me. I must have sat at the
foot of a tree for full half an hour, with the doctor's useless bills
and letters before me, with my head in my hands, and with all my
energies of body and mind utterly crushed by despair.

At the end of the half hour, the natural restlessness of my faculties
began to make itself felt.

Whatever may be said about it in books, no emotion in this world ever
did, or ever will, last for long together. The strong feeling may return
over and over again; but it must have its constant intervals of change
or repose. In real life the bitterest grief doggedly takes its rest and
dries its eyes; the heaviest despair sinks to a certain level, and stops
there to give hope a chance of rising, in spite of us. Even the joy of
an unexpected meeting is always an imperfect sensation, for it never
lasts long enough to justify our secret anticipations--our happiness
dwindles to mere every-day contentment before we have half done with it.

I raised my head, and gathered the bills and letters together, and stood
up a man again, wondering at the variableness of my own temper, at the
curious elasticity of that toughest of all the vital substances within
us, which we call Hope. "Sitting and sighing at the foot of this tree,"
I thought, "is not the way to find Alicia, or to secure my own safety.
Let me circulate my blood and rouse my ingenuity, by taking to the road
again."