Into the street she fled, ran a few paces, stopped, and looked wildly about her. Snow had begun to fall. The wind whipped her thin tattered skirts about her ankles. In all the mad night there was no beacon towards which she might make, for the little lightening of her despair. She glanced once about her; then crouched, with a dying moan, upon a doorstep. Her face was buried in her hands when, an instant later, Ned silently came upon her. He stood, looking down. Once, earlier in the evening, he had thought “She” (not the wretched girl at his feet) “might have dismissed me as effectually by gentler methods.” Yet, had he, for his part, shown more compassion towards this unhappy outcast--stained though she was--who lay here so committed to his mercy? He bent suddenly, and put his hand upon her shoulder. She did not even start now, but she uncoiled herself, with a shiver, and gazed up at him, without recognition, it seemed. “What do you intend to do?” he said. “Where will you go?” She only shook her head weakly and amazedly. He stepped back, looked up into a blinding gloom of darkness and spinning flakes. The patterns these wrought seemed the very moral of Heaven’s enactments--hieroglyphics drawn upon a slate of night. He was not theologian enough to interpret them. For him--with a sense of being enclosed and shut down within a very confined vault of human suffering (with God, maybe, walking serene and unwitting high up on the sunny lifts of ether above the earth)--the issues of life were become brutally restricted. He had had aspirations. They had been crushed under by the heavy night that had dropped upon his world. Now, in a moment, he could feel only that he was alone with a woman who loved him without one thought of the meaning of the hieroglyphics; that it lay with him, unsupported, to direct the destinies of two souls--his own and another’s--that Fortune had isolated in tragic companionship. And contrasted with the human piteousness of this other--this soul that had claimed him in the darkness into which his own had fallen--how did not the shibboleth of convention suddenly confess itself a ridiculous fetish of strings and patches--a block for a fashion-plate? He had no plan of conduct at last but to drift--and, if by way of sunny pastures, so much the less troubled would he be. His heart was moved to a dull aching passion in this first realising of its emancipation from a wounding thrall. “Get up!” he cried violently. “Do you hear? Get up, and come with me!” He turned away, and going a few paces, looked round to see if she were following. Ay, like a dog. She had risen and jumped to his order before it was well issued.