to horror, to a sort of dream
terror--his horror of being observed by some other people. If he were
on an island, like Alexander Selkirk, with only the creatures and the
trees, he would be free and glad, there would be none of this
heaviness, this misgiving. He could love the vegetation and be quite
happy and unquestioned, by himself.

He had better send a note to Hermione: she might trouble about him, and
he did not want the onus of this. So at the station, he wrote saying:

I will go on to town--I don't want to come back to Breadalby for the
present. But it is quite all right--I don't want you to mind having
biffed me, in the least. Tell the others it is just one of my moods.
You were quite right, to biff me--because I know you wanted to. So
there's the end of it.

In the train, however, he felt ill. Every motion was insufferable pain,
and he was sick. He dragged himself from the station into a cab,
feeling his way step by step, like a blind man, and held up only by a
dim will.

For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let Hermione know, and she
thought he was sulking; there was a complete estrangement between them.
She became rapt, abstracted in her conviction of exclusive
righteousness. She lived in and by her own self-esteem, conviction of
her own rightness of spirit.

CHAPTER IX.

COAL-DUST

Going home from school in the afternoon, the Brangwen girls descended
the hill between the picturesque cottages of Willey Green till they
came to the railway crossing. There they found the gate shut, because
the colliery train was rumbling nearer. They could hear the small
locomotive panting hoarsely as it advanced with caution between the
embankments. The one-legged man in the little signal-hut by the road
stared out from his security, like a crab from a snail-shell.

Whilst the two girls waited, Gerald Crich trotted up on a red Arab
mare. He rode well and softly, pleased with the delicate quivering of
the creature between his knees. And he was very picturesque, at least
in Gudrun's eyes, sitting soft and close on the slender red mare, whose
long tail flowed on the air. He saluted the two girls, and drew up at
the crossing to wait for the gate, looking down the railway for the
approaching train. In spite of her ironic smile at his picturesqueness,
Gudrun liked to look at him. He was well-set and easy, his face with
its warm tan showed up his whitish, coarse moustache, and his blue eyes
were full of shar