"Happen so."

"Dessay you've got a suitor an' all."

"None I really likes."

"I bet you 'ave. I 'eard you 'ave."

"'Tis all talk in this ol' place. Us izzen 'lowed to look at a man an' we'm courtin'."

He fingered his bowler hat. "Like that heverywhere." A silence. He looked her in the eyes. "I ain't so bad?"

"I never said 'ee wuz."

Silence. He worked all the way round the rim of his bowler.

"I know lots o' girls. AH sorts. None like you."

"Taren't so awful hard to find."

"I never 'ave. Before." There was another silence. She would not look at him, but at the edge of her apron. "'Ow about London then? Fancy seein' London?"

She grinned then, and nodded-very vehemently.

"Expec' you will. When they're a-married orf hupstairs. I'll show yer round."

"Would 'ee?"

He winked then, and she clapped her hand over her mouth. Her eyes brimmed at him over her pink cheeks.

"All they fashional Lunnon girls, 'ee woulden want to go walkin' out with me."

"If you 'ad the clothes, you'd do. You'd do very nice."

"Doan believe 'ee."

"Cross my 'eart."

Their eyes met and held for a long moment. He bowed elaborately and swept his hat to cover his left breast.

"A demang, madymosseile."

"What's that then?"

"It's French for Coombe Street, tomorrow mornin'- where yours truly will be waitin'."

She turned then, unable to look at him. He stepped quickly behind her and took her hand and raised it to his lips. She snatched it away, and looked at it as if his lips might have left a sooty mark. Another look flashed between them. She bit her pretty lips. He winked again; and then he went.

Whether they met that next morning, in spite of Charles's express prohibition, I do not know. But later that day, when Charles came out of Mrs. Tranter's house, he saw Sam waiting, by patently contrived chance, on the opposite side of the street. Charles made the Roman sign of mercy, and Sam uncovered, and once again placed his hat reverentially over his heart-as if to a passing bier, except that his face bore a wide grin.

Which brings me to this evening of the concert nearly a week later, and why Sam came to such differing conclusions about the female sex from his master's; for he was in that kitchen again. Unfortunately there was now a duenna present-Mrs. Tranter's cook. But the duenna was fast asleep in her Windsor chair in front of the opened fire of her range. Sam and Mary sat in the darkest corner of the kitchen. They did not speak. They did not need to. Since they were holding hands. On Mary's part it was but self-protection, since she had found that it was only thus that she could stop the hand trying to feel its way round her waist. Why Sam, in spite of that, and the silence, should have found Mary so understanding is a mystery no lover will need explaining.

18.

Who can wonder that the laws of society should at times be forgotten by those whom the eye of society habitually overlooks, and whom the heart of society often appears to discard?

-Dr. John Simon, City Medical Report (1849)

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bygone look.

-Hardy, "On a Midsummer Eve"

Two days passed during which Charles's hammers lay idle in his rucksack. He banned from his mind thoughts of the tests lying waiting to be discovered: and thoughts, now associated with them, of women lying asleep on sunlit ledges. But then, Ernestina having a migraine, he found himself unexpectedly with another free afternoon. He hesitated a while; but the events that passed before his eyes as he stood at the bay window of his room were so few, so dull. The inn sign-a white lion with the face of an unfed Pekinese and a distinct resemblance, already remarked on by Charles, to Mrs. Poulteney-stared glumly up at him. There was little wind, little sunlight ... a high gray canopy of cloud, too high to threaten rain. He had intended to write letters, but he found himself not in the mood.

To tell the truth he was not really in the mood for anything; strangely there had come ragingly upon him the old travel-lust that he had believed himself to have grown out of those last years. He wished he might be in Cadiz, Naples, the Morea, in some blazing Mediterranean spring not only for the Mediterranean spring itself, but to be free, to have endless weeks of travel ahead of him, sailed-towards islands, mountains, the blue shadows of the unknown.

Half an hour later he was passing the Dairy and entering the woods of Ware Commons. He could have walked in some other direction? Yes, indeed he could. But he had sternly forbidden himself to go anywhere near the cliff-meadow; if he met Miss Woodruff, he would do, politely but firmly, what he ought to have done at that last meeting-that is, refuse to enter into conversation with her. In any case, it was evident that she resorted always to the same place. He felt sure that he would not meet her if he kept well clear of it.

Accordingly, long before he came there he turned northward, up the general slope of the land and through a vast grove of ivyclad ash trees. They were enormous, these trees, among the largest of the species in England, with exotic-looking colonies of polypody in their massive forks. It had been their size that had decided the encroaching gentleman to found his arboretum in the Undercliff; and Charles felt dwarfed, pleasantly dwarfed as he made his way among them towards the almost vertical chalk faces he could see higher up the slope. He began to feel in a better humor, especially when the first beds of flint began to erupt from the dog's mercury and arum that carpeted the ground. Almost at once he picked up a test of Echinocorys scutata. It was badly worn away ... a mere trace remained of one of the five sets of converging pinpricked lines that decorate the perfect shell. But it was better than nothing and thus encouraged, Charles began his bending, stopping search.

Gradually he worked his way up to the foot of the bluffs where the fallen flints were thickest, and the tests less likely to be corroded and abraded. He kept at this level, moving westward. In places the ivy was dense-growing up the cliff face and the branches of the nearest trees indiscriminately, hanging in great ragged curtains over Charles's head. In one place he had to push his way through a kind of tunnel of such foliage; at the far end there was a clearing, where there had been a recent fall of flints. Such a place was most likely to yield tests; and Charles set himself to quarter the area, bounded on all sides by dense bramble thickets, methodically. He had been at this task perhaps ten minutes, with no sound but the lowing of a calf from some distant field above and inland; the clapped wings and cooings of the wood pigeons; and the barely perceptible wash of the tranquil sea far through the trees below. He heard then a sound as of a falling stone. He looked, and saw nothing, and presumed that a flint had indeed dropped from the chalk face above. He searched on for another minute or two; and then, by one of those inexplicable intuitions, perhaps the last remnant of some faculty from our paleolithic past, knew he was not alone. He glanced sharply round.

She stood above him, where the tunnel of ivy ended, some forty yards away. He did not know how long she had been there; but he remembered that sound of two minutes before. For a moment he was almost frightened; it seemed uncanny that she should appear so silently. She was not wearing nailed boots, but she must even so have moved with great caution. To surprise him; therefore she had deliberately followed him.

"Miss Woodruff!" He raised his hat. "How come you here?"

"I saw you pass."

He moved a little closer up the scree towards her. Again her bonnet was in her hand. Her hair, he noticed, was loose, as if she had been in wind; but there had been no wind. It gave her a kind of wildness, which the fixity of her stare at him aggravated. He wondered why he had ever thought she was not indeed slightly crazed.

"You have something ... to communicate to me?"

Again that fixed stare, but not through him, very much down at him. Sarah had one of those peculiar female faces that vary very much in their attractiveness; in accordance with some subtle chemistry of angle, light, mood. She was dramatically helped at this moment by an oblique shaft of wan sunlight that had found its way through a small rift in the clouds, as not infrequently happens in a late English afternoon. It lit her face, her figure standing before the entombing greenery behind her; and her face was suddenly very beautiful, truly beautiful, exquisitely grave and yet full of an inner, as well as outer, light. Charles recalled that it was just so that a peasant near Gavarnie, in the Pyrenees, had claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary standing on a deboulis beside his road . . . only a few weeks before Charles once passed that way. He was taken to the place; it had been most insignificant. But if such a figure as this had stood before him!

However, this figure evidently had a more banal mission. She delved into the pockets of her coat and presented to him, one in each hand, two excellent Micraster tests. He climbed close enough to distinguish them for what they were. Then he looked up in surprise at her unsmiling face. He remembered- he had talked briefly of paleontology, of the importance of sea urchins, at Mrs. Poulteney's that morning. Now he stared again at the two small objects in her hands.

"Will you not take them?"

She wore no gloves, and their fingers touched. He examined the two tests; but he thought only of the touch of those cold fingers.

"I am most grateful. They are in excellent condition."

"They are what you seek?"

"Yes indeed."

"They were once marine shells?"

He hesitated, then pointed to the features of the better of the two tests: the mouth, the ambulacra, the anus. As he talked, and was listened to with a grave interest, his disapproval evaporated. The girl's appearance was strange; but her mind-as two or three questions she asked showed-was very far from deranged. Finally he put the two tests carefully in his own pocket.

"It is most kind of you to have looked for them."

"I had nothing better to do."

"I was about to return. May I help you back to the path?"

But she did not move. "I wished also, Mr. Smithson, to thank you ... for your offer of assistance."

"Since you refused it, you leave me the more grateful."

There was a little pause. He moved up past her and parted the wall of ivy with his stick, for her to pass back. But she stood still, and still facing down the clearing.

"I should not have followed you."

He wished he could see her face, but he could not.

"I think it is better if I leave."

She said nothing, and he turned towards the ivy. But he could not resist a last look back at her. She was staring back over her shoulder at him, as if body disapproved of face and turned its back on such shamelessness; because her look, though it still suggested some of the old universal reproach, now held an intensity that was far more of appeal. Her eyes were anguished ... and anguishing; an outrage in them, a weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles of the outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. A long moment of locked eyes; and then she spoke to the ground between them, her cheeks red.

"I have no one to turn to."

"I hoped I had made it clear that Mrs. Tranter-"

"Has the kindest heart. But I do not need kindness."

There was a silence. He still stood parting the ivy.

"I am told the vicar is an excellently sensible man."

"It was he who introduced me to Mrs. Poulteney."

Charles stood by the ivy, as if at a door. He avoided her eyes; sought, sought for an exit line.

"If I can speak on your behalf to Mrs. Tranter, I shall be most happy ... but it would be most improper of me to ..."

"Interest yourself further in my circumstances."

"That is what I meant to convey, yes." Her reaction was to look away; he had reprimanded her. Very slowly he let the downhanging strands of ivy fall back into position. "You haven't reconsidered my suggestion-that you should leave this place?"

"If I went to London, I know what I should become." He stiffened inwardly. "I should become what so many women who have lost their honor become in great cities." Now she turned fully towards him. Her color deepened. "I should become what some already call me in Lyme."

It was outrageous, most unseemly. He murmured, "My dear Miss Woodruff . . ." His own cheeks were now red as well.

"I am weak. How should I not know it?" She added bitterly, "I have sinned."

This new revelation, to a stranger, in such circumstances- it banished the good the attention to his little lecture on fossil sea urchins had done her in his eyes. But yet he felt the two tests in his pockets; some kind of hold she had on him; and a Charles in hiding from himself felt obscurely flattered, as a clergyman does whose advice is sought on a spiritual problem.

He stared down at the iron ferrule of his ashplant.

"Is this the fear that keeps you at Lyme?"

"In part."

"That fact you told me the other day as you left. Is anyone else apprised of it?"

"If they knew, they would not have missed the opportunity of telling me."

There was a longer silence. Moments like modulations come in human relationships: when what has been until then an objective situation, one perhaps described by the mind to itself in semiliterary terms, one it is sufficient merely to classify under some general heading (man with alcoholic problems, woman with unfortunate past, and so on) becomes subjective; becomes unique; becomes, by empathy, instantaneously shared rather than observed. Such a metamorphosis took place in Charles's mind as he stared at the bowed head of the sinner before him. Like most of us when such moments come-who has not been embraced by a drunk?-he sought for a hasty though diplomatic restoration of the status quo.

"I am most sorry for you. But I must confess I don't understand why you should seek to ... as it were ... make me your confidant."

She began then-as if the question had been expected-to speak rapidly; almost repeating a speech, a litany learned by heart.

"Because you have traveled. Because you are educated. Because you are a gentleman. Because ... because, I do not know, I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious, Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens, stupider than the stupidest animals. I cannot believe that the truth is so. That life is without understanding or compassion. That there are not spirits generous enough to understand what I have suffered and why I suffer . . . and that, whatever sins I have committed, it is not right that I should suffer so much." There was silence. Unprepared for this articulate account of her feelings, this proof, already suspected but not faced, of an intelligence beyond convention, Charles said nothing. She turned away and went on in a quieter voice. "My only happiness is when I sleep. When I wake, the nightmare begins. I feel cast on a desert island, imprisoned, condemned, and I know not what crime it is for."

Charles looked at her back in dismay, like a man about to be engulfed by a landslide; as if he would run, but could not; would speak, but could not.

Her eyes were suddenly on his. "Why am I born what I am? Why am I not born Miss Freeman?" But the name no sooner passed her lips than she turned away, conscious that she had presumed too much.

"That question were better not asked."

"I did not mean to ..."

"Envy is forgivable in your-"

"Not envy. Incomprehension."

"It is beyond my powers-the powers of far wiser men than myself-to help you here."

"I do not-I will not believe that."

Charles had known women-frequently Ernestina herself- contradict him playfully. But that was in a playful context. A woman did not contradict a man's opinion when he was being serious unless it were in carefully measured terms. Sarah seemed almost to assume some sort of equality of intellect with him; and in precisely the circumstances where she should have been most deferential if she wished to encompass her end. He felt insulted, he felt ... he could not say. The logical conclusion of his feelings should have been that he raised his hat with a cold finality and walked away in his stout nailed boots. But he stood where he was, as if he had taken root. Perhaps he had too fixed an idea of what a siren looked like and the circumstances in which she appeared-long tresses, a chaste alabaster nudity, a mermaid's tail, matched by an Odysseus with a face acceptable in the best clubs. There were no Doric temples in the Undercliff; but here was a Calypso.

She murmured, "Now I have offended you."

"You bewilder me, Miss Woodruff. I do not know what you can expect of me that I haven't already offered to try to effect for you. But you must surely realize that any greater intimacy . . . however innocent in its intent . . . between us is quite impossible in my present circumstances."

There was a silence; a woodpecker laughed in some green recess, mocking those two static bipeds far below.