The Simon Thornthwaites were going to market simply because they did not know how to stay away. They went as naturally as the sun comes out of the east, but with a good deal less of decision about the journey. They looked dull and tired, too, less indeed as if they were setting out than as if they were wearily trundling home again. Both horse and trap looked as though they might fall to pieces after an extra jolt, and the jumble of harness was mended here and there with string. There was neither butter nor fowl in the market-basket behind; there was not even a limp rabbit dangling over the wheel. But all the time they were part of a chain which gave them a motive and impulse not their own, since others, more sure of their errand, were taking the same road. Sometimes a horseman on a young Shire went past with a flash of feather and a clumping of hoofs. Livelier traps spun by at a trot and gave them a hail. Behind and before them they had an occasional glimpse of the procession stretching to the town. They had climbed from the marsh, leaving it dropped like a colourless cloth beside the sea, and already they seemed to have been a long time on the road. They had not slept much, and, waking, had had the cheated feeling, common to the weary, that the foregoing day had never really ended nor the incoming morning ever quite begun. Indeed, the strange, dreamlike day had never really seemed to come awake. Looking back and west, they saw everything grey, with just a lightened shadow marking the far sea, and the marsh lying down on its face like a figure flung down to die. Houses sat low to the earth as if they crouched, and the trees were vague, bodiless wisps, without backbone or sap. When they had their first glimpse of Witham, they saw the town on the fell-side like a fortress through smoked glass, and the Castle alone on its hill was of shadow-stones poised on a poised cloud. The Simon Thornthwaites were old now, and under-dogs in the tussle of life, but they had once been as strong and confident as most. Sometimes they had a vision of their former selves, and wondered how this could ever have been that. The old man was thin and bent, the sort that shows the flame through the lantern long before the end, but the woman was stronger-boned, squarer, and still straight. Most of her life she had worked like a horse, but she was still straight. Her face was mask-like and her mouth close. Only her hands betrayed her at times,--old, over-done hands that would not always be still. Her eyes seemed to look straight before her at something only she could see,--staring and staring at the image which she had set up.