Sarah looked away from the house the moment he started to speak, as if some spell were broken by the sound of his voice. "Ay," she said, with a total lack of interest, and staring ahead.... "Now, master, we’d best get on." Simon, cut off in mid-flight, repeated "Rasps!" in a feeble tone, and again Sarah said "Ay," and requested him to get on. He drove away rather reluctantly, looking behind him as he went, and muttering of Taylor’s rasps and cabbishes until they were finally lost to sight. Now once more they were in the high-flanked lane, with Blindbeck and all that Blindbeck stood for fallen away at last. The cross went with them, indeed, but the calvary dropped behind. The horse turned homeward, and, encouraged by Will’s corn, showed a sudden freakish revival of vanished youth. Bicycles met and passed them in the narrow road, sliding by like thistledown on a wind, while the riders saw only an elderly couple apparently half asleep. Yet even the dullest farm-lad would have cried aloud to them if he had known to what they went. He would have flung himself off his bicycle and barred the road, a humble but valiant imitation of an Angel of God. Evening was coming, but the day was still alive, incredibly long as the afternoon had seemed. Simon’s old watch, put right that morning in Witham, asserted that it was only half-past four. The atmosphere had never been really light, and only imperceptibly was it drawing down to dusk. The grey seemed to have deepened and settled a little, but that was all. It was a day on which people forgot the time, as Mr. Dent had said, a day when they had every excuse for forgetting the right time. Simon felt suddenly as though he had never seen the sun either rise or set for at least a week. Yesterday there had been only a swift setting, hurriedly blotted out, and to-day, if there had been any fugitive brightness of farewell, it must have passed while they were still at the farm. The night was coming unduly to the grey-green land which had never had its meed of sun, just as the night came unfairly to lives whose share of glamour and glory had been missed. He longed to see a light spring out of the west, showing the silver water in a shining line, and re-tinting the heavy, neutral-coloured earth. Sun,--evening sun lying over the sea,--would have made things easier for both of them, but especially for his wife. Even though there was so little that she could see, the warmth and light would at least have lain tenderly upon her lids. Trouble and change were always easier to bear under a smiling sky; it did not mock at the trouble, as smiling faces so often seemed to do. Rain and the dark seemed to narrow a trouble in, so that change was a nameless peril into which each step was into a void. But there was to be no sun for these lost folk who seemed to be straying all the day long; only the unstirred breath of the mist in the blotted west, filling the mighty bowl at whose bottom lay the sea.