afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a
large grey hat trimmed with a black feather (I've seen her in that
finery), seize an absurdly slender parasol, climb over two stiles, tramp
over three fields and along two hundred yards of road--never further.
There stood Foster's cottage. She would help her mother to give their
tea to the younger children, wash up the crockery, kiss the little ones,
and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all
the relaxation. She never seemed to wish for anything more. And then
she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately--perhaps
helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful
spell; it was love as the Ancients understood it: an irresistible and
fateful impulse--a possession! Yes, it was in her to become haunted and
possessed by a face, by a presence, fatally, as though she had been a
pagan worshipper of form under a joyous sky--and to be awakened at last
from that mysterious forgetfulness of self, from that enchantment,
from that transport, by a fear resembling the unaccountable terror of a
brute. . . ."

With the sun hanging low on its western limit, the expanse of the
grass-lands framed in the counter-scarps of the rising ground took on
a gorgeous and sombre aspect. A sense of penetrating sadness, like that
inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence
of the fields. The men we met walked past slow, unsmiling, with downcast
eyes, as if the melancholy of an over-burdened earth had weighted their
feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.

"Yes," said the doctor to my remark, "one would think the earth is under
a curse, since of all her children these that cling to her the closest
are uncouth in body and as leaden of gait as if their very hearts were
loaded with chains. But here on this same road you might have seen