She went her way, humbly, filled with awe and wonder and intolerable envy. What was this transmuting force, this holy spirit that could draw a magic circle about a housemaid and a groom in which to sit out their hour in a public way, inviolate, divine?... What was it?... What did it mean?... What did it all mean?... And why should she, Laura, feel herself ignorant, shut out, and desperately lonely?... She was of all women fortunate.... She was alive.... She was engaged to Justin.... But this new thing—what was it?... What was it that he and she had not yet found—what gift of God that (as she saw with sudden clearness) they could in no wise find, save together?... Life and she herself and Justin had become, since the morning, mysterious and mutually inexplicable.... Why was she feeling so strangely?... Why had she to hurry past those enchanted yokels as one proved negligible, incomplete, a half creature?... Why was not Justin with her that she might carry herself as one justified, oblivious of the world as the world of her?... She came out into the broad road again and again the silence of the wide fields surged in upon her, and her soul clung to her terrified, like a wrecked sailor clinging to a spar. She should have asked Justin to come with her.... If she had asked he would have come.... It was only that it had not occurred to him.... The stubbornness that would ask nothing, that would accept nothing of him that was not spontaneous, was receiving its just reward.... It was such a silence, such a loneliness of soul—so achingly intensified by her consciousness of the two behind her in the shadows, that she felt it like a leaden cope pressing her down, crushing into shapelessness the pitiful resistance of her pride. If Justin had come to her then, she could have besieged him like any wanton for the dole of a kind look, of an arm about her shaken body. She had come to a standstill in the middle of the road because she could not bear any longer the sound of her own feet running after her: and so waited, impotently, for the passing of a fellow creature or her own mood. And presently, mercifully, the face of the night changed to her. The loneliness faded from it like a veil withdrawn, and with it the sense of isolation that had oppressed her faded too. She was gradually aware of the universal alive-ness of the still world about her. It was as if her late, bewildered thoughts had evolved some ruthless one who stood beside her, thrusting a torch into the secrets of the deep ditches and shuttered cottages and mist-veiled fields, and, with a heavy hand upon her neck, bowed her forward to peer at what the light revealed.