Why?

I stopped again dead, with the hill crest rising between me and home.  I had more than half a mind to return to her.

Then I thought of the curate’s sovereigns.  If he has missed them already, what should I return to?  And, even if I returned, how could I put them back?

And what of the night after I renounced my revenge?  What of the time when young Verrall came back?  And Nettie?

No!  The thing had to be done.

But at least I might have kissed my mother before I came away, left her some message, reassured her at least for a little while.  All night she would listen and wait for me. . . . .

Should I send her a telegram from Two-Mile Stone?

It was no good now; too late, too late.  To do that would be to tell the course I had taken, to bring pursuit upon me, swift and sure, if pursuit there was to be.  No.  My mother must suffer!

I went on grimly toward Two-Mile Stone, but now as if some greater will than mine directed my footsteps thither.

I reached Birmingham before darkness came, and just caught the last train for Monkshampton, where I had planned to pass the night.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE PURSUIT OF THE TWO LOVERS

Section 1

As the train carried me on from Birmingham to Monkshampton, it carried me not only into a country where I had never been before, but out of the commonplace daylight and the touch and quality of ordinary things, into the strange unprecedented night that was ruled by the giant meteor of the last days.

There was at that time a curious accentuation of the common alternation of night and day.  They became separated with a widening difference of value in regard to all mundane affairs.  During the day, the comet was an item in the newspapers, it was jostled by a thousand more living interests, it was as nothing in the skirts of the war storm that was now upon us.  It was an astronomical phenomenon, somewhere away over China, millions of miles away in the deeps.  We forgot it.  But directly the sun sank one turned ever and again toward the east, and the meteor resumed its sway over us.

One waited for its rising, and yet each night it came as a surprise.  Always it rose brighter than one had dared to think, always larger and with some wonderful change in its outline, and now with a strange, less luminous, greener disk upon it that grew with its growth, the umbra of the earth.  It shone also with its own light, so that this shadow was not hard or black, but it shone phosphorescently and with a diminishing intensity where the stimulus of the sun’s rays was withdrawn.  As it ascended toward the zenith, as the last trailing daylight went after the abdicating sun, its greenish white illumination banished the realities of day, diffused a bright ghostliness over all things.  It changed the starless sky about it to an extraordinary deep blue, the profoundest color in the world, such as I have never seen before or since.  I remember, too, that as I peered from the train that was rattling me along to Monkshampton, I perceived and was puzzled by a coppery red light that mingled with all the shadows that were cast by it.