en shocked to realise that her mind was relieved.

She wanted to be alone. She wanted to be away from every eye. She was
like some creature that after a long nightmare incubation is at last
born into a clear, bleak day. She had to feel herself; she had to
stretch her mind in this cheerless sunshine, this new world, where there
was to be no more Teddy and no real revenge nor compensation for Teddy.
Teddy was past....

Hitherto she had had an angry sense of being deprived of Teddy--almost
as though he were keeping away from her. Now, there was no more Teddy to
be deprived of....

She went through the straggling village, and across the fields to the
hillside that looks away towards Mertonsome and its steeple. And where
the hill begins to fall away she threw herself down under the hedge by
the path, near by the stile into the lane, and lay still. She did not so
much think as remain blank, waiting for the beginning of impressions....

It was as it were a blank stare at the world....

She did not know if it was five minutes or half an hour later that she
became aware that some one was looking at her. She turned with a start,
and discovered the Reverend Dimple with one foot on the stile, and an
expression of perplexity and consternation upon his chubby visage.

Instantly she understood. Already on four different occasions since
Teddy's disappearance she had seen the good man coming towards her,
always with a manifest decision, always with the same faltering doubt as
now. Often in their happy days had she and Teddy discussed him and
derided him and rejoiced over him. They had agreed he was as good as
Jane Austen's Mr. Collins. He really was very like Mr. Collins, except
that he was plumper. And now, it was as if he was transparent to her
hard defensive scrutiny. She knew he was impelled by his tradition, by
his sense of fitness, by his respect for his calling, to offer her his
ministrations and consolations, to say his large flat amiabilities over
her and pat her kindly with his hands. And she knew too that he dreaded
her. She knew that the dear old humbug knew at the bottom of his heart
quite certainly that he was a poor old humbug, and that she was in his
secret. And at the bottom of his heart he found himself too honest to
force his poor platitudes upon any who would not be glad of them. If she
could have been glad of them he would have had no compunction. He was a
man divided against himself; failing to carry through h