He found himself jostling through the shopping crowd on the sunny side of Regent Street. He felt now that he looked over the swarming, preoccupied heads at distant things. He and Marjorie were going out of it all, going clean out of it all. They were going to escape from society and shopping, and petty engagements and incessant triviality--as a bird flies up out of weeds. § 10 But Marjorie fluctuated more than he did. There were times when the expedition for which he was now preparing rapidly and methodically seemed to her the most adventurously-beautiful thing that had ever come to her, and times when it seemed the maddest and most hopeless of eccentricities. There were times when she had devastating premonitions of filth, hunger, strain and fatigue, damp and cold, when her whole being recoiled from the project, when she could even think of staying secure in London and letting him go alone. She developed complicated anxieties for the children; she found reasons for further inquiries, for delay. "Why not," she suggested, "wait a year?" "No," he said, "I won't. I mean we are to do this, and do it now, and nothing but sheer physical inability to do it will prevent my carrying it out.... And you? Of course you are to come. I can't drag you shrieking all the way to Labrador; short of that I'm going to _make_ you come with me." She sat and looked up at him with dark lights in her upturned eyes, and a little added warmth in her cheek. "You've never forced my will like this before," she said, in a low voice. "Never." He was too intent upon his own resolve to heed her tones. "It hasn't seemed necessary somehow," he said, considering her statement. "Now it does." "This is something final," she said. "It is final." She found an old familiar phrasing running through her head, as she sat crouched together, looking up at his rather gaunt, very intent face, the speech of another woman echoing to her across a vast space of years: "Whither thou goest I will go----" "In Labrador," he began.... CHAPTER THE THIRD THE PILGRIMAGE TO LONELY HUT § 1 Marjorie was surprised to find how easy it was at last to part from her children and go with Trafford. "I am not sorry," she said, "not a bit sorry--but I am fearfully afraid. I shall dream they are ill.... Apart from that, it's strange how you grip me and they don't...." In the train to Liverpool she watched Trafford with the queer feeling which comes to all husbands and wives at times that that other partner is indeed an undiscovered stranger, just beginning to show perplexing traits,--full of inconceivable possibilities.