that he relied on to move desire in women's eyes; and now it traveled,
forlorn and ineffectual, abject almost in its futility, over the gray
moorgrass where she went.

* * * * *

That was on Wednesday the fourteenth. On Friday the sixteenth he saw
her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex's house.

He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex's coffin to
Upthorne. Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes,
waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.

In the east the broken shoulders of the hills receded, winding with
the dale like a coast line of gray cliffs above the mist that was
their sea. Tortured, mutilated by the jagged cloud that held her, the
moon struggled and tore her way, she lifted and freed herself high and
struck the marshes white. Defaced and sinister, above her battlements,
she looked at the house and made it terrible, moon-haunted. Its door,
low lighted, stood open to the night.

Rowcliffe drew back from the threshold to let a woman pass out.
Looking up, he was aware that he had seen her again. He supposed it
was the light of that detestable moon that gave her face its queer
morbid whiteness.

She went by without seeing him, clenching her hands and carrying her
young head high; and he saw that her eyes still held the tears that
she was afraid to spill.