Mrs. Severn had walked on and was now standing on the ridge, silhouetted against the sky. Anna soon overtook her, and they went on quickly, shortening the way by striking into the ling. Her anger had melted. The old tenderness was in her heart; for some bitter moments it had seemed indeed that the new shame must quench it. Nor was it her new-found happiness that inspired it. Her anger must have humiliated Clothilde, and she could not bear to think she was humiliated. During the heavy walking through the ling she did all she could to be kind. The beautiful face, growing weary and haggard with a rare anxiety which she attributed to the wish to be home before her husband, touched her deeply. She helped her on, holding up her dress, throwing the shade of the parasol wholly over her, and hoping each moment that she might strike some chord that would unseal her heart and give some clue to its enigmatical life. But Mrs. Severn remained silent, walking with her eyes down, but carefully picking her way among the tufts of ling. Anna in her white dress and sun hat got along easily, but Mrs. Severn's progress was laboured. She looked extraordinary, a figure more fit for a stage than the moor, her black draperies at once handsome and negligent, her arms bare from the elbows, the lace strings of her bonnet arranged about her throat with a mantilla-like effect, which set off the fine contour of her face. Always conscious of herself, she was now. 'I wonder, if any one met us, what we should be taken for?' she said, as they stood resting a moment by leaning against the wall of the coal-pit shanty. 'I think I might be taken for an actress gone astray.' Anna thought this so much nearer the truth than was intended that she said nothing. 'And you for my maid.' 'Probably,' said Anna, and walked on again. She felt too worn by the varying strong emotions she had gone through to dissent from any suggestion. It seemed hopeless to think of reaching Clothilde's inner self, but she could not help speculating over it. Life's opening out for herself during the last few hours had quickened her perceptions. A new experience of the influence each can exert on the lives round it, bringing a rush of undreamt-of possibilities that invested the vista of the future with a halo of definite and sacred responsibilities, had stirred her to a wider grasp of the issues involved in action, as well as to a keener questioning of their mainspring. She had known for years that Clothilde did not love her husband; but considered that she had no capacity either for love or hate, treating her emotions as diffused and colourless, and herself none the more unhappy for her indifference.