CHAPTER V
FOUR YEARS OF HOPE DEFERRED
(1852—1856)
I was fancy free and unknew I love,
But I fell in love and in madness fell;
I write you with tears of eyes so belike,
They explain my love, come my heart to quell.
ON leaving Boulogne, Isabel saw Richard Burton no more for four years, and only heard of him now and again from others or through the newspapers. She went back to London with her people, and outwardly took up life and society again much where she had left it two years before. But inwardly things were very different. She had gone to Boulogne an unformed girl; she had left it a loving woman. Her ideal had taken form and shape; she had met the only man in all the world whom she could love, the man to whom she had been "destined from the beginning," and her love for him henceforth became, next to her religion, the motive power of her actions and the guiding principle of her life. All her youth, until she met him, she had yearned for
