“Thank you very much.”  She drew her skirt gently from his detaining grasp.

“No—­wait—­please.  There’s a great hulking brute of a thorn stuck in the hem.”

She waited.

“Confound my clumsiness!  I’ve done it now!”

“Done what?” She looked down; on the dainty hem there appeared three distinct crimson stains.  Mr. Rickman’s face was crimson, too, with a flush of agony.  Whatever he did for her his clumsiness made wrong.

“I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve ruined your—­your pretty dress, Miss Harden.”

For it was a pretty, a very pretty, a charming dress.  And he was making matters worse by rubbing it with his pocket-handkerchief.

“Please—­please don’t bother,” said she, “it doesn’t matter.” (How different from the behaviour of Miss Walker when Spinks spilt the melted butter on her shoulder!) “You’ve hurt your own hands more than my dress.”

The episode seemed significant of the perils that awaited him in his intercourse with Miss Harden.

She went on.  The narrow hill-track ended in the broad bridle-path that goes straight up Harcombe (not Harmouth) valley.  He wondered, with quite painful perplexity, whether he ought still to follow at a discreet distance, or whether he might now walk beside her.  She settled the question by turning round and waiting for him to come up with her.  So they went up the valley together, and together climbed the steep road that leads out of it and back in the direction they had just left.  The mist was thinner here at the top of the hill, and Rickman recognized the road he had crossed when he had turned eastwards that morning.  He could now have found his way back perfectly well; but he did not say so.  A few minutes’ walk brought them to the place where he had sat down in his misery and looked over Harmouth valley.

Here they stopped, each struck by the strange landscape now suddenly revealed to them.  They stood in clear air above the fog.  It had come rolling in from the south, submerging the cliffs, and the town, and the valley; and now it lay smooth and cold and blue-white, like the sea under a winter sky.  They might have been looking down on some mysterious world made before man.  No land was to be seen save the tops of the hills lashed by the torn edges of the mist.  Westward, across the bay, the peaks of the cliffs showed like a low, flat coast, a dull purplish line tormented by a livid surf.  The flooded valley had become an arm of that vague sea.  And from under the fog, immeasurably far below, there came the muffled sound of the mother sea, as if it were beating on the invisible floor of the world.

“I say, that’s rather uncanny, isn’t it?” So uncanny did it seem to him that he felt that it called for remark.

She looked at him with that faintly interrogative lifting of the eyebrows, which always seemed familiar to him.  He remembered afterwards that Horace Jewdwine had the same trick.  But in her, accompanied as it was by a pretty lifting of the corners of her mouth, it expressed friendly interest, in Jewdwine, apathy and a certain insolence.  And yet all the time she was wondering how she should break it to him that their ways must now diverge.