Sophia by Stanley J. Weyman

If Lady Betty's sprightliness ever deserted her, it returned with the morning as regularly as the light. But by Sophia the depressing influence of a strange place, viewed through sheets of rain, was felt to the full next day. The mind must be strong that does not tinge the future with the colours which the eye presents at the moment; and her's was nowise superior to the temptation. Her spirits, as she rose amid the discomforts of a Sussex inn -- and Sussex inns and Sussex roads were then reputed among the worst in England -- and prepared to continue the journey, were at their lowest ebb. She dreaded the meeting, now so imminent, with Sir Hervey. She shrank as the bather on the verge of the stream shrinks, from the new sphere, the new home, the new duties on which the day must see her enter; and enter unsupported by love. She was cold, she shook, her knees quaked under her; she had golden visions of what might have been, and her heart sobbed as she plucked herself from them. To Lady Betty's eye, and in the phrase of the day, she had the vapours; alas, she suffered with better reason that the fine ladies who had lately made them the fashion.

When they had once set forth, however, the motion and the change of outlook, even though it was but a change from dripping eaves to woods thrashing in the wet wind, gave something of a fillip to her spirits. Moreover, the nearer we come to a dreaded event, the more important loom the brief stages that divide us from it. We count by months, then by days; at length, when hours only remain, the last meal is an epoch on the hither side of which we sit almost content. It was so with Sophia when she had once started. They were to dine at Lewes; until Lewes was reached she put away the future, and strove to enjoy the hours that intervened.