“Oh, I shall find it all right,” said he, inspired by his double meaning.

“I don’t think you will, if the fog lasts.  I am going that way and I had better show you.”

Show him?  Was it possible?

She led the way, all too swiftly, yet with a certain leisure in her haste.  He followed with a shy delight.

He was familiar enough by this time with her indoor aspect, with her unique and perfect manner of sitting still; now he saw that her beauty was of that rare kind that is most beautiful in movement.  He would have liked that walk to last for ever, for the pure pleasure of following, now the delicate poise of her head, now the faint ripple of her shoulders under her thin coat, now the lines of her skirt breaking and flowing with the almost imperceptible swinging of her hips.

Her beauty, as he now reflected, was of the sort that dwells less in the parts than in the whole, it was subtle, pervading, and profound.  It rejected all but the finer elements of sex.  In those light vanishing curves her womanhood was more suggested than defined; it dawned on him in tender adumbration rather than in light.  Such beauty is eloquent and prophetic through its richness of association, its kindred with all forms of loveliness.  As Lucia moved she parted with some of that remoter quality that had first fascinated, then estranged him; she took on the grace of the creatures that live free in the sunlight and in the open air.

The mist shut them in with its grey walls.  There was nothing to be seen but the patch of grass trodden by her feet, and her moving figure, grey on grey.

The walk was somewhat lacking in incident and conversational openings.  Such as occurred seemed, like Kitty Palliser’s hat, to be packed with meaning.  There was the moment, the dreadful moment, when he lagged behind and lost sight of her.  The moment, his opportunity, when an enormous bramble caught and pinned her by the feet and skirt.  She tried to tread on it with one foot and walk away from it with the other, a thing manifestly impossible and absurd.  Besides, it hurt—­horribly.  He knelt before her on the wet moor, unconscious of his brand-new trousers, conscious of nothing but the exquisite moment; and, with hands that trembled violently, freed first her delicate feet and then her skirt.  He breathed hard, for the operation was intricate and took time.  That bramble seemed to have neither beginning nor end, it branched out in all directions and was set with multitudinous and powerful thorns.  Lucia stood still, being indeed unable to move, and watched his long, slender fingers adroitly disentangling her.

“I’m afraid you’re hurting yourself,” said she.

“Not at all,” said Mr. Rickman gallantly, though the thorns tortured his hands, drawing drops of blood.  His bliss annihilated pain.

“Take care,” said she, “you are letting yourself get terribly torn.”

He took no notice; but breathed harder than ever.  “There, I’ve got it all off now, I think.”