the man, who was looking into the
fire.

The conversation showed no vitality, and down it dropped dead as before,
the man who was standing up continuing to gaze into the moisture. What
had at first appeared as an epicene shape the decreasing space resolved
into a cloaked female under an umbrella: she now relaxed her pace, till,
reaching the directing-post where the road branched into two, she paused
and looked about her. Instead of coming further she slowly retraced her
steps for about a hundred yards.

'That's an appointment,' said the first speaker, as he removed the cigar
from his lips; 'and by the lords, what a day and place for an appointment
with a woman!'

'What's an appointment?' inquired his friend, a town young man, with a
Tussaud complexion and well-pencilled brows half way up his forehead, so
that his upper eyelids appeared to possess the uncommon quality of
tallness.

'Look out here, and you'll see. By that directing-post, where the two
roads meet. As a man devoted to art, Ladywell, who has had the honour of
being hung higher up on the Academy walls than any other living painter,
you should take out your sketch-book and dash off the scene.'

Where nothing particular is going on, one incident makes a drama; and,
interested in that proportion, the art-sportsman puts up his eyeglass (a
form he adhered to before firing at game that had risen, by which
merciful arrangement the bird got safe off), placed his face beside his
companion's, and also peered through the opening. The young
pupil-teacher--for she was the object of their scrutiny--re-approached
the spot whereon she had been accustomed for the last many weeks of her
journey home to meet Christopher, now for the first time missing, and
again she seemed reluctant to pass the hand-post, for that marked the
point where the chance of seeing him ended. She glided backwards as
before, this time keeping her face still to the front, as if trying to
persuade the world at large, and her own shamefacedness, that she had not
yet approached the place at all.

'Query, how long will she wait for him (for it is a man to a certainty)?'
resumed the elder of the smokers, at the end of several minutes of
silence, when, full of vacillation and doubt, she became lost to view
behind some bushes. 'Will she reappear?' The smoking went on, and up
she came into open ground as before, and walked by.

'I wonder who the girl is, to come to such a place in this weather?