ss-country train, and had left the Oxford
towers and spires, the shrunken summer Isis, and the flat hot river
meadows far behind him. He had meant to stay at Merton, as we know, for
the night. Now, his one thought was to get back to Catherine. The
urgency of Mr. Grey's words was upon him, and love had a miserable pang
that it should have needed to be urged.

By eight o'clock he was again at Churton. There were no carriages
waiting at the little station, but the thought of the walk across the
darkening common through the August moonrise had been a refreshment to
him in the heat and crowd of the train. He hurried through the small
town, where the streets were full of summer idlers, and the lamps were
twinkling in the still balmy air, along a dusty stretch of road, leaving
man and his dwellings farther and farther to the rear of him, till at
last he emerged on a boundless tract of common, and struck to the right
into a cart-track leading to Murewell.

He was on the top of a high sandy ridge, looking west and north, over a
wide evening world of heather and wood and hill. To the right, far
ahead, across the misty lower grounds into which he was soon to plunge,
rose the woods of Murewell, black and massive in the twilight distance.
To the left, but on a nearer plane, the undulating common stretching
downwards from where he stood rose suddenly towards a height crowned
with a group of gaunt and jagged firs--landmarks for all the plain--of
which every ghostly bough and crest was now sharply outlined against a
luminous sky. For the wide heaven in front of him was still delicately
glowing in all its under parts with soft harmonies of dusky red or blue,
while in its higher zone the same tract of sky was closely covered with
the finest network of pearl-white cloud, suffused at the moment with a
silver radiance so intense that a spectator might almost have dreamed
the moon had forgotten its familiar place of rising, and was about to
mount into a startled expectant west. Not a light in all the wide
expanse, and for a while not a sound of human life, save the beat of
Robert's step, or the occasional tap of his stick against the pebbles of
the road.

Presently he reached the edge of the ridge whence the rough track he was
following sank sharply to the lower levels. Here was a marvellous point
of view, and the rector stood a moment, beside a bare weather-blasted
fir, a ghostly shadow thrown behind him. All around the gorse and
heather