He walked off, throwing a parting word behind him.

"Now understand, please, I can't have anybody here when we lock up for
the night."

Laura hardly heard him. She was looking first to one side of the station,
then to the other. The platform and line stood raised under the hill.
Just outside the station to the north the sands of the estuary stretched
bare and wide under the moon. In the other direction, on her right hand,
the hills rose steeply; and close above the line a limestone quarry made
a huge gash in the fell-side. She stood and stared at the wall of
glistening rock that caught the moon; at the little railing at the top,
sharp against the sky; at the engine-house and empty trucks.

Suddenly she turned back towards Mason. He stood a few yards away on the
platform, watching her, and possessed by a dumb rage of jealousy that
entirely prevented him from playing any rational or plausible part. Her
bitter tone, her evident misery, her refusal an hour or two before to let
him be her escort home--all that he had feared and suspected that
morning--during the past few weeks,--these things made a dark tumult
about him, in which nothing else was audible than the alternate cries of
anger and passion.

But she walked up to him boldly. She tried to laugh.

"Well! it is very unlucky and very disagreeable. But the station-master
says there is a respectable inn. Will you go and see, while I wait? If it
won't do--if it isn't a place I can go to--I'll rest here while you ask,
and then I shall walk on over the sands to Marsland. It's eight miles--I