to a more ordinary pace; but still she did not
speak. Turnbull, who kept a more common and sensible view of the case
than anyone else, made some remark about the moonlight; but something
indescribable made him also relapse into silence.

All this time MacIan had been in a sort of monstrous delirium, like some
fabulous hero snatched up into the moon. The difference between this
experience and common experiences was analogous to that between waking
life and a dream. Yet he did not feel in the least as if he were
dreaming; rather the other way; as waking was more actual than dreaming,
so this seemed by another degree more actual than waking itself. But it
was another life altogether, like a cosmos with a new dimension.

He felt he had been hurled into some new incarnation: into the midst
of new relations, wrongs and rights, with towering responsibilities and
almost tragic joys which he had as yet had no time to examine. Heaven
had not merely sent him a message; Heaven itself had opened around him
and given him an hour of its own ancient and star-shattering energy.
He had never felt so much alive before; and yet he was like a man in a
trance. And if you had asked him on what his throbbing happiness hung,
he could only have told you that it hung on four or five visible facts,
as a curtain hangs on four of five fixed nails. The fact that the lady
had a little fur at her throat; the fact that the curve of her cheek
was a low and lean curve and that the moonlight caught the height of
her cheek-bone; the fact that her hands were small but heavily gloved as
they gripped the steering-wheel; the fact that a white witch light was
on the road; the fact that the brisk breeze of their passage stirred and
fluttered a little not only the brown hair of her head but the black
fur on her cap. All these facts were to him certain and incredible, like
sacraments.

When they had driven half a mile farther, a big shadow was flung across
the path, followed by its bulky owner, who eyed the car critically but
let it pass. The silver moonlight picked out a piece or two of pewter
ornament on his blue uniform; and as they went by they knew it was a
sergeant of police. Three hundred yards farther on another policeman
stepped out into the road as if to stop them, then seemed to doubt his
own authority and stepped back again. The girl was a daughter of the
rich; and this police suspicion (under which all the poor live day and
night) stung her for the f