She inhaled the dank chillness of the fog gratefully.  It suited the occasion better far than sunshine and bright skies.  For winter, darkness, sullen flowing waters and desolate crying winds furnished the accompaniment of those earlier meetings.  Hearing the tolling bell she strove to relive them, and found she did so with singularly mounting wealth and precision of detail.  Not only vision but sense pushed backward and inward, revitalizing what had been; until she ached with suspense and yearning, shrewdly evaded dangers, surmounted obstructions by action at once bold and wary and tasted the transfiguring rapture of the end attained.

In the soberness of her middle years, occupied as she was with the rough, exacting business of the inn, and with the management of accumulating landed and other property—­anxiety born of her son’s perilous calling never absent from her thought—­Lesbia Faircloth inclined to live exclusively in the present.  Hence the colours of her solitary passion had somewhat faded, becoming clouded and dim.  Recent events—­led by the ugly publicity of Reginald Sawyer’s sermon—­served to revive those colours.  To-day they glowed rich and splendid, a robing of sombre glory to her inward and backward searching sight.

The bell tolled quicker, announcing the immediate approach of the dead.  Lesbia listened, her head raised, her face, turned to open window, felt over by the clammy, impalpable fingers of the fog.

Now they bore the coffin up the churchyard path, as she timed it.  She wondered who the bearers might be, and whether they carried it shoulder high?  The path was steep; and Charles Verity, though spare and lean, broad of chest and notably tall.  Bone tells.  They would feel the weight, would breathe hard, stagger a little even and sweat.

And with this visualizing of grim particulars, love, bodily love and desire of that which rested stark and for ever cold within the narrow darkness of the coffin—­shut away from all comfort of human contact and the dear joys of a woman’s embrace—­rushed on her like a storm, buffeted and shook her, so that she looked to right and to left as asking help, while her hands worked one upon the other in the hollow of her lap.

Nor did Darcy Faircloth figure in Deadham’s record funeral gathering.  Upon the day preceding it, having watched by Charles Verity’s corpse during the previous night, he judged it well to take his new command—­a fine, five-thousand-ton steamer, carrying limited number of passengers as well as cargo, and trading from Tilbury to the far East and to Japan, via the Cape.