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 unexpected-ly 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, moun-tains, 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 north-ward, 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 exam-ined 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 disappro-val 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 p............