"Yes. But you were going down into the thick of the fog. You might easily have walked over the cliff--and broken your neck." He laughed as if that was the most delightfully humorous idea. "I don't know," said he, "that it would have mattered very much if I had." She said nothing. She never did when he made these excursions into the personal. Of course it would not have mattered to Miss Harden if he had gone over the cliff. He had been guilty, not only of an unpardonable social solecism, but of a still more unpardonable platitude. They had reached the top of the cliff, and Lucia stood still. "Isn't there another short cut cut across the valley?" he asked. "There is; but I don't advise you to try it. And there is a way round by the road--if you can find it." He smiled. Had he tried to approach her too soon, and was she reminding him that short cuts are dangerous? There was a way round--if he could find it. If indeed! "Oh, I shall find it all right," said he, inspired by his double meaning. "I don't think you will, if the fog lasts. I am going that way and I had better show you." Show him? Was it possible? She led the way, all too swiftly, yet with a certain leisure in her haste. He followed with a shy delight. He was familiar enough by this time with her indoor aspect, with her unique and perfect manner of sitting still; now he saw that her beauty was of that rare kind that is most beautiful in movement. He would have liked that walk to last for ever, for the pure pleasure of following, now the delicate poise of her head, now the faint ripple of her shoulders under her thin coat, now the lines of her skirt breaking and flowing with the almost imperceptible swinging of her hips. Her beauty, as he now reflected, was of the sort that dwells less in the parts than in the whole, it was subtle, pervading, and profound. It rejected all but the finer elements of sex. In those light vanishing curves her womanhood was more suggested than defined; it dawned on him in tender adumbration rather than in light. Such beauty is eloquent and prophetic through its richness of association, its kindred with all forms of loveliness. As Lucia moved she parted with some of that remoter quality that had first fascinated, then estranged him; she took on the grace of the creatures that live free in the sunlight and in the open air. The mist shut them in with its grey walls. There was nothing to be seen but the patch of grass trodden by her feet, and her moving figure, grey on grey.