At the edge of the woods reigned sleep universal, and not one of the common voices of night broke in upon it. The firs had ceased for a moment their eternal whisper; the bare boughs of oak and larch were still. The hour was breathless and so silent that the world seemed dead rather than asleep. Once only a small creature hurried from Rhoda’s path and rustled in the leaves beside her; but for the rest no cry of night bird, no bay of hound, no whinny of roaming horse broke the great peace. Only the river lifted its voice like a sigh in the dimness, but other murmur there was none. Diffused light scarcely defined a way amid the black hillocks of the gorse. Earth under these conditions quite changed its contours and withheld its tones. Such colour as persisted was transformed and only the palest things--tree trunks and boulders streaked and splashed with quartz--still stood forth in the vague blur of darkness. Such obscurity and obliteration, with its hint of unseen dangers and obvious doubts, had been sinister, if not terrific, to many women; night’s black hand upon the extinguished world had driven most feminine spirits even from grievous thoughts to present dread; but for Rhoda darkness was only less familiar than noonday. There existed nothing in this immanent concealment to distract her torments, and all the formless earth was distinct, clear, explicit as contrasted with the chaos of her soul. Upon Ringmoor she came at last, and there some faint breath of air seemed to be stirring by contrast with the stagnation beneath. It touched her forehead and she sucked it in thirstily. Here the mighty spaces of the waste were faintly lighted within a little radius of the wanderer, but beyond, the naked earth rolled away into utter darkness at every side. The sky, while luminous in contrast with the world beneath it, was entirely overcast. A complete and featureless cloud, without rift or rent to break its midnight monotony, spread upon the firmament. Even the place of the moon might not be perceived. Below, Ringmoor soaked up the illumination to almost total extinction; above, the sombrous air hung heavy and clear, permeated evenly by lustre of the hidden moon. Only at the horizon might one perceive the immense difference between the light of earth and sky, and the large illumination spread by the one and swallowed by the other. Ringmoor’s black bosom opened for Rhoda, then shut behind her and engulfed her. Along the path, from darkness into darkness, she proceeded and bore her weight of agony through the insensible waste, as a raindrop passes over a leaf and leaves no sign. Futile shadow of a shade, she crept across the darkness and vanished beneath it; broken with the greatest suffering her spirit was built to bear, she put forth upon the void and tottered forward to the shuffle of her footsteps and the muffled drumming of her own pulse.