goes, is agitation of necessity in the midst of them."

Madame de Vallorbes leaned back with a little sigh and air of exquisite
resignation.

"All the same, the majority of women are unhappy enough, heaven knows!
If Honoria, or any other sweet, feminine Quixote, can find means to
lighten the burden of our lives, she has my very sincere thanks, well
understood."

Richard drew his whip across the backs of the trotting horses, making
them plunge forward against that blank, impalpable wall of
all-encircling, ever-receding, ever-present fog. The carriage had just
crossed the long, white-railed bridge, spanning the little river and
space of marsh on either side, and now entered Sandyfield Street. The
tops of the tall Lombardy poplars were lost in gloom. Now and again the
redness of a lighted cottage window, blurred and contorted in shape,
showed through the gray pall. Slow-moving, country figures, passing
vehicles, a herd of some eight or ten cows--preceded by a diabolic
looking billy-goat, and followed by a lad astride the hind-quarters of
a bare-backed donkey--grew out of pallid nothingness as the carriage
came abreast of them, and receded with mysterious rapidity into
nothingness again. The effect was curiously fantastic and unreal. And
as the minutes passed that effect of unreality gained upon Richard's
imagination, until now--as last evening in the stately solitude of the
Long Gallery--he became increasingly aware of the personality of his
companion, increasingly penetrated by the feeling of being alone with
that personality, as though the world, so strangely blotted out by
these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human
interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this
fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete,
exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She
alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly,
causing an excitement in him which at once hindered and demanded
speech.

Night began to close in in good earnest. Passing the broad, yellowish
glare streaming out from the rounded tap-room window of the Calmady
Arms, and passing from the end of the village street on to the open
common, the light had become so uncertain that Richard could no longer
see his companion's face clearly. This was almost a relief to him, so
that, mastering at once his diffidence and his excitement, he spoke.

"Look here, Helen," he said