Holmes shook the grimy hand, and then stood a moment looking back to the mill, from which the hands were just coming, and then down at the phaeton moving idly down the road. How cold it was growing! People passing by had a sickly look, as if they were struck by the plague. He pushed the damp hair back, wiping his forehead, with another glance at the mill-women coming out of the gate, and then followed the phaeton down the hill. CHAPTER VI. An hour after, the evening came on sultry, the air murky, opaque, with yellow trails of colour dragging in the west: a sullen stillness in the woods and farms; only, in fact, that dark, inexplicable hush that precedes a storm. But Lois, coming down the hill-road, singing to herself, and keeping time with her whip-end on the wooden measure, stopped when she grew conscious of it. It seemed to her blurred fancy more than a deadening sky: a something solemn and unknown, hinting of evil to come. The dwarf-pines on the road-side scowled weakly at her through the gray; the very silver minnows in the pools she passed, flashed frightened away, and darkened into the muddy niches. There was a vague dread in the sudden silence. She called to the old donkey, and went faster down the hill, as if escaping from some overhanging peril, unseen. She saw Margret coming up the road. There was a phaeton behind Lois, and some horsemen: she jolted the cart off into the stones to let them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the gray distance. Lois's vivid eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the colour seemed jeering and mocking to the girl's sensitive instinct, keenly alive to every trifle. She did not know that it is the colour of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams. As the phaeton went slowly down, Margret came nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling the air. Lois saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding to the fence, as they met her. Holmes's cold, wandering eye turned on the little dusty figure standing there, poor and despised. Polston called his eyes hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang into them now; a gray shadow creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in that flashing moment. The phaeton was gone in an instant, leaving her alone in the road. One of the men looked back, and then whispered something to the lady with a laugh. She turned to Holmes, when he had finished, fixing her light, confusing eyes on his face, and softening her voice. "Fred swears that woman we passed was your first love. Were you, then, so chivalric? Was it to have been a second romaunt of 'King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid?'"