nce her experience within this maze of
motion from her experience without it. Her beginning to dance had
been like a change of atmosphere; outside, she had been steeped in
arctic frigidity by comparison with the tropical sensations here. She
had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one
might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood. Wildeve
by himself would have been merely an agitation; Wildeve added to the
dance, and the moonlight, and the secrecy, began to be a delight.
Whether his personality supplied the greater part of this sweetly
compounded feeling, or whether the dance and the scene weighed
the more therein, was a nice point upon which Eustacia herself was
entirely in a cloud.

People began to say "Who are they?" but no invidious inquiries were
made. Had Eustacia mingled with the other girls in their ordinary
daily walks the case would have been different: here she was not
inconvenienced by excessive inspection, for all were wrought to their
brightest grace by the occasion. Like the planet Mercury surrounded
by the lustre of sunset, her permanent brilliancy passed without much
notice in the temporary glory of the situation.

As for Wildeve, his feelings are easy to guess. Obstacles were a
ripening sun to his love, and he was at this moment in a delirium of
exquisite misery. To clasp as his for five minutes what was another
man's through all the rest of the year was a kind of thing he of
all men could appreciate. He had long since begun to sigh again
for Eustacia; indeed, it may be asserted that signing the marriage
register with Thomasin was the natural signal to his heart to return
to its first quarters, and that the extra complication of Eustacia's
marriage was the one addition required to make that return compulsory.

Thus, for different reasons, what was to the rest an exhilarating
movement was to these two a riding upon the whirlwind. The dance had
come like an irresistible attack upon whatever sense of social order
there was in their minds, to drive them back into old paths which were
now doubly irregular. Through three dances in succession they spun
their way; and then, fatigued with the incessant motion, Eustacia
turned to quit the circle in which she had already remained too long.
Wildeve led her to a grassy mound a few yards distant, where she
sat down, her partner standing beside her. From the time that he
addressed her at the beginning of the dance till now