From the turn of her head and the even falling of her
feet he felt her unconscious of his existence. And her unconsciousness
was hateful to him. It wiped him clean out of the universe of
noticeable things.
The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth. And he said to
himself. "Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at
night and isn't afraid?"
* * * * *
He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the
high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect
and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when
he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses
as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved.
And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun."
The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts
and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs,
half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm
getting on. She's aware of me all right."
She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from
Upthorne. He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at
dawn.
The smell of the sick man, and of the bed and of the low close room
was still in his nostrils, and in his ears the sounds of dying and of
mourning, and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough
to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew.
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