But it was not so. On the open moors, as often as not, they had to go
single file through the heather, along a narrow sheep track, Rowcliffe
leading; and it is difficult, not to say impossible, to command the
attention of a young woman walking in your rear. And a thousand things
distracted Gwenda: the cry of a mountain sheep, the sound and
sight of a stream, the whirr of dark wings and the sudden
"Krenk-er-renk-errenk!" of the grouse shooting up from the heather.
And on the high roads where they went abreast she was apt to be
carried away by the pageant of earth and sky; the solid darkness
that came up from the moor; the gray, aerial abysses of the dale; the
awful, blank withdrawal of Greffington Edge into the night. She was
off, Heaven knew where, at the lighting of a star in the thin blue;
the movement of a cloud excited her; or she was held enchanted by
the pale aura of moonrise along the rampart of Greffington Edge. She
shared the earth's silence and the throbbing passion of the earth as
the orbed moon swung free.
And in her absorption, her estranging ecstasy, Rowcliffe at last found
something inimical.
* * * * *
He told himself that it was an affectation in her, or a lure to draw
him after her, as it would have been in any other woman. The little
red-haired nurse would have known how to turn the earth and the moon
to her own purposes and his. But all the time he knew that it was not
so.
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