The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold. Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly. She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the green grass ran like water. "I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're talking." "If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk." The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw everything must see. A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise. Then Tanqueray spoke. "Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?" "Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura." "Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while it makes us poor devils blind as bats." "There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy." "Ah--you should see him trying to fly by daylight." Silence and the lucid twilight held them close. "Jinny--do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from Wendover?" She did not answer him. "Jinny--we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between." It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made. "We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said. "Don't let's talk about it any more." "It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns it to poison." "Yes." "And haven't we always told the truth to each other?" "Not in the beginning. If we only had----" "We didn't know it then." "_I_ knew it," she said. "Why didn't you tell me, then?" "You know what you'd have thought of me if I had." "You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it." "Risked it?" "Risked it." "But I risked losing you altogether. What did _you_ risk?" He was silent. "Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice." "Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?" "Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you." "If you'd let me see it."