g at her
any longer. When sweetmeats were offered them, they put out great
red hands to take them, and felt themselves treading cumbrously like
tight-coated soldiers among these soft instinctive people. But soon the
life of the village took no notice of them; they had become absorbed
in it. The women's hands became busy again with the straw; their eyes
dropped. If they moved, it was to fetch something from the hut, or to
catch a straying child, or to cross the space with a jar balanced on
their heads; if they spoke, it was to cry some harsh unintelligible
cry. Voices rose when a child was beaten, and fell again; voices rose
in song, which slid up a little way and down a little way, and settled
again upon the same low and melancholy note. Seeking each other, Terence
and Rachel drew together under a tree. Peaceful, and even beautiful at
first, the sight of the women, who had given up looking at them, made
them now feel very cold and melancholy.

"Well," Terence sighed at length, "it makes us seem insignificant,
doesn't it?"

Rachel agreed. So it would go on for ever and ever, she said, those
women sitting under the trees, the trees and the river. They turned away
and began to walk through the trees, leaning, without fear of discovery,
upon each other's arms. They had not gone far before they began to
assure each other once more that they were in love, were happy, were
content; but why was it so painful being in love, why was there so much
pain in happiness?

The sight of the village indeed affected them all curiously though all
differently. St. John had left the others and was walking slowly down to
the river, absorbed in his own thoughts, which were bitter and unhappy,
for he felt himself alone; and Helen, standing by herself in the sunny
space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments of disaster.
The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears high and low in
the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top. How small the little
figures looked wandering through the trees! She became acutely conscious
of the little limbs, the thin veins, the delicate flesh of men and
women, which breaks so easily and lets the life escape compared with
these great trees and deep waters. A falling branch, a foot that slips,
and the earth has crushed them or the water drowned them. Thus thinking,
she kept her eyes anxiously fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she
could protect them from their fate. Turning, she found