They were a pathetic pair, he thought, looking from one bent figure to the other. Wolf was a sad enough picture, a fine man gone to wreck in a few devastating months, but the pathos of the woman went deeper. The hard life on the marsh had broken her long since, stolen her youth in the first years of marriage, crippled her with rheumatism, stamped on her thin face that look of passionless endurance which can be seen in many a farmer’s wife who has found her burden too heavy and gone on bearing it. She had been pretty, once. In the line of her cheek and the set of her head was still a beauty of refinement absent from Francey’s mother over at Ladyford, and the thin fingers of her worn hands were curiously sensitive and suggestive of a rare intuition. But that was all that was left to her. She was finished, as Wolf was finished, and the one thing that life might yet have held for them was to be taken away. Lanty wondered how Lup could look at them, night after night, sitting there hopeless, and steel his heart to the unbreathed prayer, even though sacrifice might mean daily crucifixion, with the love denied so close at hand. But Lup himself was part of the cruel situation. He did not come to it from outside, as Lancaster came, with fresh eyes full of pity. Remembering both Wolf’s words and the Dockerays’ embarrassment, he found himself noting the old woman’s constant and fixed gaze out to sea. Her faded eyes were still clear, and the large pupils had the effect of dark pebbles seen through deep pools. Time after time he succeeded in drawing them to his own face, but, his question answered, they returned instantly to some invisible point beyond. Wolf had said she was watching for something, and it certainly seemed like it, for the glance was not the wandering one of custom, but a stare of genuine expectation, suggesting held breath and stiffened muscles. Wolf looked at her uneasily at times, and when she became conscious of his gaze she would bring her own with an effort to the guest, but always, always it went back. The sensation of mystery deepened, and Lancaster stirred restlessly under its touch. The sky had darkened and then filled with fire, and beneath the dull thunder-glow the houses on Bytham Knott looked like flakes of snow dropped on a sullen slab of granite. The thin trees stood like dumb sentinels of fear; the green of the fields smote the eye; a sudden clash of milk-pails from without set every nerve leaping, and then the stillness sank again. And the sands and the bank were stiller than the air. The only moving thing was the shining, quivering line far away to the west.