But that was reckless.

* * * * *

And in all those hours, for his opportunities counted by hours now, he had never found his moment.  There was plenty of time, and their isolation (his and hers) in Garthdale left him dangerously secure.  All the same, by April Rowcliffe was definitely looking for the moment, the one shining moment, that must sooner or later come.

It was, indeed, always coming.  Over and over again he had caught sight of it; it signaled, shining; he had been ready to seize it, when something happened, something obscured it, something put him off.

He never knew what it was at the time, but when he looked back on these happenings he discovered that it was always something that Gwenda Cartaret did.  You would have said that no scene on earth could have been more favorable to a lover’s enterprise than these long, deserted roads and the vast, twilit moors; and that a young woman could have found nothing to distract her from her lover there.

But it was not so.  On the open moors, as often as not, they had to go single file through the heather, along a narrow sheep track, Rowcliffe leading; and it is difficult, not to say impossible, to command the attention of a young woman walking in your rear.  And a thousand things distracted Gwenda:  the cry of a mountain sheep, the sound and sight of a stream, the whirr of dark wings and the sudden “Krenk-er-renk-errenk!” of the grouse shooting up from the heather.  And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night.  She was off, Heaven knew where, at the lighting of a star in the thin blue; the movement of a cloud excited her; or she was held enchanted by the pale aura of moonrise along the rampart of Greffington Edge.  She shared the earth’s silence and the throbbing passion of the earth as the orbed moon swung free.

And in her absorption, her estranging ecstasy, Rowcliffe at last found something inimical.

* * * * *

He told himself that it was an affectation in her, or a lure to draw him after her, as it would have been in any other woman.  The little red-haired nurse would have known how to turn the earth and the moon to her own purposes and his.  But all the time he knew that it was not so.  There was no purpose in it at all, and it was unaware of him and of his purposes.  Gwenda’s joy was pure and profound and sufficient to itself.  He gathered that it had been with her before he came and that it would remain with her after he had gone.

He hated to think that she should know any joy that had not its beginning and its end in him.  It took her from him.  As long as it lasted he was faced with an incomprehensible and monstrous rivalry.