She rested presently where a great stone thrust up out of night beside her way. She knew it for a friend and sank upon it now, and put her forehead against it. Here reigned such a peace as only the deaf and the desert sentinel can know--a peace beyond all experience of gregarious man---a peace impossible within any hand-wrought dwelling but the grave. There was no wind to strike sound from dry heath, or rush, or solitary stone; no water flowed near enough to send its voices hither; no rain fell to utter its whisper on earth. The silence was consummate. Light had long since been extinguished in the few dwellings visible from Ringmoor. Trowlesworthy and Brisworthy and Ditsworthy--all were dim. No ray penetrated the sky or glowed upon the land; and night’s self now began to darken, as the moon sank to her setting. And then from afar, out of the gloom of the south, a distant beacon flashed even to this uplifted solitude; and a beam that blinked for the ships now reached one life-foundered creature, where she sat in a silence as deep, in a loneliness as vast, as the silence and the loneliness of the sea. The light was familiar to Rhoda; through wanderings and vigils in high places she had seen it many times; and she knew that it spoke of danger to the vessels and guarded them upon their ways. Time rolled on; the earth rolled on; only this conscious fragment of life stranded here between time and earth lay still, chained down with her load of grief and horror. Long she remained, until there stole over Ringmoor the unspeakable stupor and lifelessness of the hour before dawn. Now even creatures of night had made an end of their labours and were sleeping in holt or den; and through this trance and absolute desistance, the woman’s soul still battled with its burdens and cried out to her oblivious environment. She walked onward again and forced herself and her pangs upon the earth’s suspended animation. She outraged inert Ringmoor by thus moving and suffering within its bosom, when the rule of the time was cessation and dreamless peace. She rolled unsteadily in her going, where all else was stable and motionless; she throbbed in her body and in her soul, where all else was unconscious; her dust endured the tortures of hunger and profound physical exhaustion, where nearly all other living things were filled and sleeping; her mind rose, racked to a new and higher anguish at the thought of the future, where all else was mindless and without care or grief. She considered what must follow the rising of another sun, and she longed that she might wander and suffer here, through a moonless night, for evermore.