ape and form, lifting
for a sudden instant and showing green grass and the pale spring
flowers in the border by the windows, then charging down again with
fold on fold of vapour thicker and thicker, swaying and throbbing with
a purpose and meaning of its own. Early in the afternoon Mrs. Bolitho
took a peep at her lodgers. She did not intend to spy--she was an
honest woman--but she shared most vividly the curiosity of all the
village about "these two queer ignorant children," as she called them.
Standing in the bow-window of her own little parlour she could see the
bow-window and part of the room on the opposite side of the house-door.
Maggie and Martin stood there looking out into the mist. The woman
could see Maggie's face, dim though the light was, and a certain
haunting desire in it tugged at Mrs. Bolitho's tender heart. "Poor
worm," she thought to herself, "she's longing for him to say something
to her and he won't." They were talking. Then there was a pause and
Martin turned away. Maggie's eyes passionately besought him. What did
she want him to do--to say? Mrs. Bolitho could see that the girl's
hands were clenched, as though she had reached, at last, the very
limits of her endurance. He did not see. His back was half turned to
her. He did not speak, but stood there drumming with his hands on the
glass.

"Oh, I could shake him," thought Mrs. Bolitho's impatience. For a time
Maggie waited, never stirring, her eyes fixed, her body taut.

Then she seemed suddenly to break, as though the moment of endurance
was past. She turned sharply round, looking directly out of her window
into Mrs. Bolitho's room--but she didn't see Mrs. Bolitho.

That good woman saw her smile, a strange little smile of defiance,
pathos, loneliness, cheeriness defeated. She vanished from her window
although he stood there. A moment later, in a coat and hat, she came
out of the front door, stood for a moment on the outskirts of the mist
looking about her, then vanished on to the moor.

"She oughtn't to be out in this," thought the farmer's wife. "It's
dangerous."

She waited a little, then came and knocked on the door of the other
sitting-room. She met Martin in the doorway.

"Oh, Mrs. Bolitho," he said, "I thought I'd go to the circus for half
an hour."

"Very well, sir," she said.

He too disappeared. She sat in her kitchen all the afternoon busily
mending the undergarments of her beloved James. But her thought were
not with her husban