him, if she was dependent, was for such things
as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave
as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic
about Jane. She had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven.
She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.

He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it
and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his
arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.

Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given
to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever.
She had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had
drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from
disaster.

(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever
since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)

They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They
drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They
stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of
the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay
between them and the farm lane.

The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung
across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the
landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line
after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the
hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to
darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.

Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly.
She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a
haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like
lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of
perished streams, the green grass ran like water.

"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're
talking."

"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."

The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she
could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw
everything must see.

A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.

Then Tanqueray spoke.

"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and