to free herself; and in a minute or two the
milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of
the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened
nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that
the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere
acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them
something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for
their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the
dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of
so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract
of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward--for a
short time or for a long.

END OF PHASE THE THIRD

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

XXV

Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who
had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark
unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the
barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime
temperature into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think
of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.

Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept
apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,
while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance
disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He
could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and
what their mutual bearing should be before third parties
thenceforward.

Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed
through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which
as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world
without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
How curious you are to me!--

resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold,
the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the
engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;
while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, no