Without troubling to understand—she was inclined to think it verbiage—she made a small sound of assent. “That is why you want to go again to a place, and I don’t care so much, because I have it with me,” he concluded. XI They decided to find their way through the lanes to Alum Bay, and then, keeping the cross in sight, to return over the downs, with the moon-path broad on the water before them. For the moon was rising late. Twilight, however, rose more rapidly than they had anticipated. The lane twisted among meadows and wild lands and copses—a wilful little lane, quite incomprehensible. So they lost their distant landmark, the white cross. Darkness filtered through the daylight. When at last they came to a signpost, it was almost too dark to read it. The fingers seemed to withdraw into the dusk the more they looked. “We must go to the left,” said Helena. To the left rose the downs, smooth and grey near at hand, but higher black with gorse, like a giant lying asleep with a bearskin over his shoulders. Several pale chalk-tracks ran side by side through the turf. Climbing, they came to a disused chalk-pit, which they circumvented. Having passed a lonely farmhouse, they mounted the side of the open down, where was a sense of space and freedom. “We can steer by the night,” said Siegmund, as they trod upwards pathlessly. Helena did not mind whither they steered. All places in that large fair night were home and welcome to her. They drew nearer to the shaggy cloak of furze. “There will be a path through it,” said Siegmund. But when they arrived there was no path. They were confronted by a tall, impenetrable growth of gorse, taller than Siegmund. “Stay here,” said he, “while I look for a way through. I am afraid you will be tired.” She stood alone by the walls of gorse. The lights that had flickered into being during the dusk grew stronger, so that a little farmhouse down the hill glowed with great importance on the night, while the far-off in visible sea became like a roadway, large and mysterious, its specks of light moving slowly, and its bigger lamps stationed out amid the darkness. Helena wanted the day-wanness to be quite wiped off the west. She asked for the full black night, that would obliterate everything save Siegmund. Siegmund it was that the whole world meant. The darkness, the gorse, the downs, the specks of light, seemed only to bespeak him. She waited for him to come back. She could hardly endure the condition of intense waiting. He came, in his grey clothes almost invisible. But she felt him coming. “No good,” he said, “no vestige of a path. Not a rabbit-run.” “Then we will sit down awhile,” said she calmly. “‘Here on this mole-hill,’” he quoted mockingly. They sat down in a small gap in the gorse, where the turf was very soft, and where the darkness seemed deeper. The night was all fragrance, cool odour of darkness, keen, savoury scent of the downs, touched with honeysuckle and gorse and bracken scent.