Towards evening Tom and Thyrza usually closed the shop, and came out—either for a stroll up to Worge to see his family, or for some more adventurous excursion to Brownbread Street, or Furnacefield, or up to the North Road and the straggle of old Dallington. They had one or two quite long walks, for a new enterprise had kindled in them both, and for the first time there was mystery and allure in some shaky signpost at the throws, or a little lane creeping off secretly. One day they walked as far as Brightling, past the obelisk, through the shuttling dimness of Pipers Wood and up Twelve Oaks Hill by strange farms to the sudden clump of Brightling among the trees. They went into the churchyard where the yews spread shadows nearly as dark as their own blackness and strange white peacocks perched on the tombstones, with shrill, unnatural cries. There was also a huge cone-shaped object, built of damp stones and thickly grown with moss, and Thyrza unaccountably took fright at this, and the peacocks, and the shadows and the trees, and walked for most of the way home with her head under Tom’s coat. He did not often think of when this time should end, of the day that crept nearer and nearer to him over drowsing twilights and magical, green sunrises. He knew that a month hence all this delight would be a memory, that between him and the spurge-thickening fields of May would lie all the life of ugly adventure into which fate had pitched him—and Thyrza would come to him only on scraps of paper, in puffs of scent, in fugitive dreams, in a passing light in some other girl’s eyes.... But he was too simple and too happy to let thoughts of the future spoil the present, besides, his habit of disregarding the future now stood his friend. He would not see the clover in bloom, but saw it in the green—deep, rippling, gleaming, like the sea—he would miss the hay, but now he could see the buttercups under the moon, so yellow that they seemed to paint the sky and turn the moon to honey; Thyrza might in a month’s time be a memory, belong to phantasy, but now she was a woman solid and close, his woman, the maker of his home, the maker of himself anew.... Once his mother had borne him, and now it seemed as if this woman had borne him again, into a new experience, a new happiness, a new wonder—so perfect and complete that sometimes he almost felt as if it did not matter whether he held it for ever or for a day. 11