He saw her again late—­incredibly late—­that night as the moon swept from the south toward Karva.  She was a long way off, coming down from her hill, a white speck on the gray moor.  He pulled up his horse and waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his horse’s hoofs in turn, spinning out the time.  When he heard her he drew himself upright and looked straight at her as she passed him.  She flashed by like a huntress, like Artemis carrying the young moon on her forehead.  From the turn of her head and the even falling of her feet he felt her unconscious of his existence.  And her unconsciousness was hateful to him.  It wiped him clean out of the universe of noticeable things.

The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth.  And he said to himself.  “Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at night and isn’t afraid?”

* * * * *

He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved.  And he smiled and said to himself, “She’s doing it for fun, pure fun.”

The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts and on her hair.  She darted away at the clank of his horse’s hoofs, half-savage, divinely shy.  And he said to himself that time, “I’m getting on.  She’s aware of me all right.”

She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from Upthorne.  He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at dawn.

The smell of the sick man, and of the bed and of the low close room was still in his nostrils, and in his ears the sounds of dying and of mourning, and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew.  And in his eyes the unknown girl and her behavior became suddenly adorable.  She was the darting joy and the poignant sweetness, and the sheer extravagant ardor and energy of life.  His tempestuously romantic youth rose up and was troubled at the sight of her.  And his eyes, that had stared at her in wonder and amusement and inquisitive interest, followed her now with that queer pathos that they had.  It was the look that he relied on to move desire in women’s eyes; and now it traveled, forlorn and ineffectual, abject almost in its futility, over the gray moorgrass where she went.

* * * * *

That was on Wednesday the fourteenth.  On Friday the sixteenth he saw her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex’s house.

He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex’s coffin to Upthorne.  Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes, waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.