Afterwards, she could never make up her mind whether she was glad or sorry she had gone. She had expected to meet Henrietta within a mile or two of the bridge, and the further she went without a sight of the small figure walking towards her, the more necessary it became to proceed, but she felt a deadly sickness of this road. She loved each individual tree, each bush and field and the view from every point, but the whole thing she hated. It was the personification of mistake, disappointment and slow disillusion, but now it was all shrouded in darkness and she seemed to be walking on nothing, through nothing and towards nothing. She herself was nothing and she thought of nothing, though now and then a little wave of anxiety washed over her. Where was Henrietta? She became genuinely alarmed when, in the hollow between the track and the rising fields, she saw a fire and discovered by its light a caravan, a cart, a huddle of dark figures, a tethered pony, and heard the barking of dogs. There were gipsies camping in the sheltered dip. If Henrietta had walked into their midst, she might have been robbed, she would certainly have been frightened; and Rose stood still, listening intently. The cleared space, where the wood had been, stretched away to a line of trees edging the main road and above it there was a greenish colour in the sky. There was not a sound but what came from the encampment. Down there the fire glowed like some enormous and mysterious jewel and before it figures which had become poetical and endowed with some haggard kind of beauty passed and vanished. They might have been employed in the rites of some weird worship and the movements which were in reality connected with the cooking of some snared bird or rabbit seemed to have a processional quality. The fire was replenished, the stew was stirred, there was a faint clatter of tin plates and a sharp cracking of twigs: a figure passed before the fire with extraordinary gestures and slid into the night: another figure appeared and followed its predecessor: smoke rose and a savoury smell floated on the air. Suddenly a child wailed and Rose had the ghastly impression that it was the child who was in the pot. Cautiously she stepped into the clearing; the dogs barked again and she ran swiftly, as silently as possible, leaping over the small hummocks of heath, dodging the brushwood and finding a certain pleasure in her own speed and in her fear that the dogs would soon be snapping at her heels. If she did not find Henrietta on the road, she would go on to Sales Hall. Very high up, clouds floated as though patrolling the sky; they found in her fleeting figure something which must be watched.