But Rachel was still agitated; she could not get away from the sight they had just seen.  Instead of answering Hewet she persisted.

“Love’s an odd thing, isn’t it, making one’s heart beat.”

“It’s so enormously important, you see,” Hewet replied.  “Their lives are now changed for ever.”

“And it makes one sorry for them too,” Rachel continued, as though she were tracing the course of her feelings.  “I don’t know either of them, but I could almost burst into tears.  That’s silly, isn’t it?”

“Just because they’re in love,” said Hewet.  “Yes,” he added after a moment’s consideration, “there’s something horribly pathetic about it, I agree.”

And now, as they had walked some way from the grove of trees, and had come to a rounded hollow very tempting to the back, they proceeded to sit down, and the impression of the lovers lost some of its force, though a certain intensity of vision, which was probably the result of the sight, remained with them.  As a day upon which any emotion has been repressed is different from other days, so this day was now different, merely because they had seen other people at a crisis of their lives.

“A great encampment of tents they might be,” said Hewet, looking in front of him at the mountains.  “Isn’t it like a water-colour too—­you know the way water-colours dry in ridges all across the paper—­I’ve been wondering what they looked like.”

His eyes became dreamy, as though he were matching things, and reminded Rachel in their colour of the green flesh of a snail.  She sat beside him looking at the mountains too.  When it became painful to look any longer, the great size of the view seeming to enlarge her eyes beyond their natural limit, she looked at the ground; it pleased her to scrutinise this inch of the soil of South America so minutely that she noticed every grain of earth and made it into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power.  She bent a blade of grass, and set an insect on the utmost tassel of it, and wondered if the insect realised his strange adventure, and thought how strange it was that she should have bent that tassel rather than any other of the million tassels.

“You’ve never told me you name,” said Hewet suddenly.  “Miss Somebody Vinrace. . . .  I like to know people’s Christian names.”

“Rachel,” she replied.

“Rachel,” he repeated.  “I have an aunt called Rachel, who put the life of Father Damien into verse.  She is a religious fanatic—­the result of the way she was brought up, down in Northamptonshire, never seeing a soul.  Have you any aunts?”

“I live with them,” said Rachel.

“And I wonder what they’re doing now?” Hewet enquired.

“They are probably buying wool,” Rachel determined.  She tried to describe them.  “They are small, rather pale women,” she began, “very clean.  We live in Richmond.  They have an old dog, too, who will only eat the marrow out of bones. . . .  They are always going to church.  They tidy their drawers a good deal.”  But here she was overcome by the difficulty of describing people.