everything, putting a white winding-sheet not about the earth only, but the very air also.  The cotton blouse that Julia wore became limp and wet as if it had been dipped in water; she could see the fog condensing in beads on her companion’s coat almost like hoar frost; it lay on every low-growing rose bush and bramble that they stepped upon, a curious transformer of all near objects, a complete obliterator of all more distant ones.

They pushed on as quickly as might be, climbing little hills, descending into hollows; stumbling among rabbit holes, threading their way through thickets; apparently finding something amusing in the patriarchal colonies of rabbit burrows that tripped them up, and stopping to argue, though hardly in earnest, as to whether they had passed that way or not, when some white-barked tree, or other landmark, loomed suddenly out of the thickening mist.  Once it seemed the fog was going to lift; Julia thought she saw the outline of a distant hill, but either it was closed in again directly, or else she mistook a thicker fold of cloud for a more solid object, for it was lost almost before she pointed it out.

For something over two hours they walked and stumbled, and went up small ascents and came down small declines; then suddenly they came upon the white-barked tree again.  It was the same one that they had seen more than an hour and a half ago; Rawson-Clew recognised it by a peculiar warty growth where the branches forked; they had now approached it from the other side, but clearly it was the same one, and they had come round in a circle.

He stopped and pointed it out to her.  “I am afraid,” he said, “we had better do what is recommended when the clouds come down on the mountains.”

“And that is?” Julia asked.

“Sit down and wait till they shift.”

She could not but see the advisability of this, also she was very tired, the going for these two hours had not been easy, and it had come at the end of a long day.  She would not admit, even to herself, that she was tired, but she was, so she agreed to the waiting; after all, it was impossible to pretend longer that they were going to get home easily, and were not really hopelessly astray.

“We will go a little way in among the trees,” Rawson-Clew said; “it is more sheltered, and we shall be able to find the way quite as easily from one place as another when the fog lifts.”

They found as sheltered a spot as they could, and sat down under a big tree; as they did so his hand came in contact with Julia’s wet sleeve and cold arm.  “How cold you are!” he said.  “You have nothing on.”

“Oh, yes, I have,” she assured him.  “I did not avail myself of your permission this morning.”

He took off his coat and put it round her.

But she threw it off again.  “That won’t do at all,” she said; “now you have nothing on, and that is much more improper; women may sit in their shirt sleeves, men may not.”