was yet intense the days had considerably shortened, and before he had
advanced a mile on his way all the heath purples, browns, and greens
had merged in a uniform dress without airiness or graduation, and
broken only by touches of white where the little heaps of clean quartz
sand showed the entrance to a rabbit-burrow, or where the white flints
of a footpath lay like a thread over the slopes. In almost every
one of the isolated and stunted thorns which grew here and there a
night-hawk revealed his presence by whirring like the clack of a mill
as long as he could hold his breath, then stopping, flapping his
wings, wheeling round the bush, alighting, and after a silent interval
of listening beginning to whirr again. At each brushing of Clym's
feet white miller-moths flew into the air just high enough to catch
upon their dusty wings the mellowed light from the west, which now
shone across the depressions and levels of the ground without falling
thereon to light them up.

Yeobright walked on amid this quiet scene with a hope that all would
soon be well. Three miles on he came to a spot where a soft perfume
was wafted across his path, and he stood still for a moment to
inhale the familiar scent. It was the place at which, four hours
earlier, his mother had sat down exhausted on the knoll covered with
shepherd's-thyme. While he stood a sound between a breathing and a
moan suddenly reached his ears.

He looked to where the sound came from; but nothing appeared there
save the verge of the hillock stretching against the sky in an
unbroken line. He moved a few steps in that direction, and now he
perceived a recumbent figure almost close at his feet.

Among the different possibilities as to the person's individuality
there did not for a moment occur to Yeobright that it might be one of
his own family. Sometimes furze-cutters had been known to sleep out of
doors at these times, to save a long journey homeward and back again;
but Clym remembered the moan and looked closer, and saw that the form
was feminine; and a distress came over him like cold air from a cave.
But he was not absolutely certain that the woman was his mother till
he stooped and beheld her face, pallid, and with closed eyes.

His breath went, as it were, out of his body and the cry of anguish
which would have escaped him died upon his lips. During the momentary
interval that elapsed before he became conscious that something must
be done all sense of time and p