Bunbury was quite silent for a few moments; then, while the pine-needle carpet seemed to rise up under his feet, he took her ungloved right hand, and raised it, stick and all, to meet his face as he bent over it, like a man stooping to drink. He kissed it, hurriedly and awkwardly, but in an instant the fine and slender fingers had escaped from his lips, and he stood by her, speechless and dizzy. In that moment of silence his heart opened and let in her dearness like a flood; before the next could dawn with its possibilities, a woman’s voice broke out of the wood, through twilight barred with tree stems. It was so near, it was so whetted with agony, so flung about with gusts of passion, that, for the moment, oblivious of what had just passed, they stared at each other for the space of a long-held breath, and were carried on towards it with that instinct that drags every human being towards suffering. A smell of wood-smoke drifted lightly in the air; it strengthened as a bend of the path straightened before them, till they saw among the trees a group of men, a fire of fir-branches crackling in a bed of red ember and white ash, and down at the left side of the path a pond that glimmered darkly in a pale setting of sedgy grass. There was a punt on the pond, and boat-hooks and ropes were flung about. Glasgow was standing by, why or how it did not occur to Slaney to inquire. There were several countrymen whom she recognized, and all seemed silently intent on some central catastrophe. The woman’s voice was unintelligible now, half-smothered and near the ground, as if her mouth were laid against the grass. Two men stooped and tried to pull her to her feet. A red head appeared, swaying, as when, a month before, Maria Quin staggered through the drunken crowd while they closed her father’s coffin. Slaney saw now what it was that lay on the ground beside her; the fixed sprawl of the limbs in the soaked clothing, the discoloured cheek, torn by boat-hooks; it expressed with terrific completeness the hunted life, the lonely act of death that had attained such peace as this stillness might betoken. Tom Quin’s black-and-grey dog moved restlessly round the body of his master, sniffing closely at the face, trying to turn over with his nose the rigid hand that still clutched a fragment of sodden reed, in that dumb distress and fear of death that animals must bear uncomforted. Slaney dragged her eyes from the engrossing horror of it, and in doing so met those of Lady Susan at the far side of the group; but nothing seemed strange to her now, not even the white fixity of Lady Susan’s face, that told of a plucky woman strongly moved. At that instant Maria Quin broke out of the group and confronted Glasgow, eyes and face and voice beyond all control or desire of it, and repellent as human frenzy must inevitably be.