When the whole Egdon concourse had left the site of the bonfire to its
accustomed loneliness, a closely wrapped female figure approached the
barrow from that quarter of the heath in which the little fire lay. Had
the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her as the woman
who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the approach
of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top, where the red
coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in the corpse
of day. There she stood still around her stretching the vast night
atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with the total
darkness of the heath below it might have represented a venial beside a
mortal sin.

That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in her
movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form being
wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and her head in
a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this hour and place.
Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the northwest; but
whether she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts which
played about her exceptional position, or because her interest lay in
the southeast, did not at first appear.

Her reason for standing so dead still as the pivot of this circle
of heath-country was just as obscure. Her extraordinary fixity, her
conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among other
things an utter absence of fear. A tract of country unaltered from that
sinister condition which made Caesar anxious every year to get clear of
its glooms before the autumnal equinox, a kind of landscape and weather
which leads travellers from the South to describe our island as Homer's
Cimmerian land, was not, on the face of it, friendly to women.