tanding there, and presently
returned with a tumbler of milk which she placed on a deal table
standing near me. To my remarks she replied in monosyllables, and stood
impassively, her hands at her side, her eyes cast down, waiting for me
to drink the milk and go. And when I had finished it and set the glass
down and thanked her, she turned in silence and went back to that inner
room from which she first came. And hot and tired as I had felt a few
moments before, and desirous of an interval of rest in the cool shade,
I was glad to be out in the burning sun once more, for the sight of that
young woman had chilled my blood and made the heat out-of-doors seem
grateful to me.

The sight of such a face in the midst of such surroundings had produced
a shock of surprise, for it was noble in shape, the features all fine
and the mouth most delicately chiselled, the eyes dark and beautiful,
and the hair of a raven blackness. But it was a colourless face, and
even the lips were pale. Strongest of all was the expression, which had
frozen there, and was like the look of one on whom some unimaginable
disaster or some hateful disillusionment had come, not to subdue nor
soften, but to change all its sweet to sour, and its natural warmth to
icy cold.

Chapter Eighteen: Branscombe

Health and pleasure resorts and all parasitic towns in fact, inland or
on the sea, have no attractions for me and I was more than satisfied
with a day or two of Sidmouth. Then one evening I heard for the first
time of a place called Branscomb--a village near the sea, over by Beer
and Seaton, near the mouth of the Axe, and the account my old host gave
me seemed so attractive that on the following day I set out to find
it. Further information about the unknown village came to me in a
very agreeable way in the course of my tramp. A hotter walk I never
walked--no, not even when travelling across a flat sunburnt treeless
plain, nearer than Devon by many degrees to the equator. One wonders why
that part of Devon which lies between the Exe and the Axe seems actually
hotter than other regions which undoubtedly have a higher temperature.
After some hours of walking with not a little of uphill and downhill,
I began to find the heat well-nigh intolerable. I was on a hard dusty
glaring road, shut in by dusty hedges on either side. Not a breath of
air was stirring; not a bird sang; on the vast sky not a cloud appeared.
If the vertical sun had poured down water ins