Maria turned away. Her head ached wildly, and instead of returning to the house, she passed round the end of the shed, and into the field at the back, that the damp wind of the hillside might blow upon her hot forehead. Her face was quite white under its sunburn and freckles, except where the skin below the eyes showed a lavender tinge; the eyes themselves had a dry stare in them, yet there was nothing random or ungoverned about her. Grief drives the active to activity, and perhaps the long toils of the night, when successive candles found her still sweeping and washing in preparation for the wake and the inquest, had saved her from the reaction from her outburst in the wood; perhaps passion is normal and without reaction in those whose hair is truly red. The wind soothed her aching head, and she went slowly on and sat down on a stone, with the empty cup and saucer in her lap, looking away up the slope to where a ridge of hill was visible through the soft movement of the mist. She did not at first observe that a grey animal with a black muzzle had leaped on to the loose wall that surrounded the field she was in, and was crouching and looking at her intently. It jumped down with exquisite lightness, a pale grey fox with a beautiful white-tipped brush, and crossed the open towards the barn where Tom Quin lay. As it did so, Maria saw it, and sprang to her feet, her mouth open and her eyes starting. The cup and saucer fell with a clatter, and the fox, which had seemed disposed to loiter as it passed close under the wall of the shed, glanced back, looked about it, and after a moment of seeming indecision, turned and trotted at its ease up the hill, heading apparently for much the same point as that from which it had just come. Grey as the mist itself, it glided away, till it disappeared among the clumps of gorse, while somewhere overhead a seagull made its unhappy cry.