When panting sighs the bosom fill,

And hands by chance united thrill

At once with one delicious pain

The pulses and the nerves of twain;

When eyes that erst could meet with ease,

Do seek, yet, seeking, shyly shun

Ecstatic conscious unison,—

The sure beginnings, say, be these,

Prelusive to the strain of love

Which angels sing in heaven above?

Or is it but the vulgar tune,

Which all that breathe beneath the moon

So accurately learn—so soon?

—A. H.  Clough, Poem (1844)

And now she was sleeping.

That was the disgraceful sight that met Charles’s eyes as he finally steeled himself to look over the partition. She lay curled up like a small girl under her old coat, her feet drawn up from the night’s cold, her head turned from him and resting on a dark-green Paisley scarf; as if to preserve her one great jewel, her loosened hair, from the hayseed beneath. In that stillness her light, even breathing was both visible and audible; and for a moment that she should be sleeping there so peacefully seemed as wicked a crime as any Charles had expected.

Yet there rose in him, and inextinguishably, a desire to protect. So sharply it came upon him, he tore his eyes away and turned, shocked at this proof of the doctor’s accusation, for he knew his instinct was to kneel beside her and comfort her . . . worse, since the dark privacy of the barn, the girl’s posture, suggested irresistibly a bedroom. He felt his heart beating as if he had run a mile. The tiger was in him, not in her. A moment passed and then he retraced his steps silently but quickly to the door. He looked back, he was about to go; and then he heard his own voice say her name. He had not intended it to speak. Yet it spoke.

“Miss Woodruff.”

No answer.

He said her name again, a little louder, more himself, now that the dark depths had surged safely past.

There was a tiny movement, a faint rustle; and then her head appeared, almost comically, as she knelt hastily up and peeped over the partition. He had a vague impression, through the motes, of shock and dismay.

“Oh forgive me, forgive me ...”

The head bobbed down out of sight. He withdrew into the sunlight outside. Two herring gulls flew over, screaming rau-cously. Charles moved out of sight of the fields nearer the Dairy. Grogan, he did not fear; or expect yet. But the place was too open; the dairyman might come for hay . . . though why he should when his fields were green with spring grass Charles was too nervous to consider.

“Mr. Smithson?”

He moved round back to the door, just in time to prevent her from calling, this time more anxiously, his name again. They stood some ten feet apart, Sarah in the door, Charles by the corner of the building. She had performed a hurried toilet, put on her coat, and held her scarf in her hand as if she had used it for a brush. Her eyes were troubled, but her features were still softened by sleep, though flushed at the rude awakening.

There was a wildness about her. Not the wildness of lunacy or hysteria—but that same wildness Charles had sensed in the wren’s singing ... a wildness of innocence, almost an eagerness. And just as the sharp declension of that dawn walk had so confounded—and compounded—his ear-nest autobiographical gloom, so did that intensely immediate face confound and compound all the clinical horrors bred in Charles’s mind by the worthy doctors Matthaei and Grogan. In spite of Hegel, the Victorians were not a dialectically minded age; they did not think naturally in opposites, of positives and negatives as aspects of the same whole. Par-adoxes troubled rather than pleased them. They were not the people for existentialist moments, but for chains of cause and effect; for positive all-explaining theories, carefully studied and studiously applied. They were busy erecting, of course; and we have been busy demolishing for so long that now erection seems as ephemeral an activity as bubble-blowing. So Charles was inexplicable to himself. He managed a very unconvincing smile.

“May we not be observed here?”

She followed his glance towards the hidden Dairy.

“It is Axminster market. As soon as he has milked he will be gone.”

But she moved back inside the barn. He followed her in, and they stood, still well apart, Sarah with her back to him.

“You have passed the night here?”

She nodded. There was a silence.

“Are you not hungry?”

............