Forty minutes later, however, he had to resign himself to the fact that he was to have no further luck, at least among the flints below the bluff. He regained the turf above and walked towards the path that led back into the woods. And there, a dark movement!

She was halfway up the steep little path, too occupied in disengaging her coat from a recalcitrant bramble to hear Charles’s turf-silenced approach. As soon as he saw her he stopped. The path was narrow and she had the right of way. But then she saw him. They stood some fifteen feet apart, both clearly embarrassed, though with very different expressions. Charles was smiling; and Sarah stared at him with profound suspicion.

“Miss Woodruff!”

She gave him an imperceptible nod, and seemed to hesitate, as if she would have turned back if she could. But then she realized he was standing to one side for her and made hurriedly to pass him. Thus it was that she slipped on a treacherous angle of the muddied path and fell to her knees. He sprang forward and helped her up; now she was totally like a wild animal, unable to look at him, trembling, dumb.

Very gently, with his hand on her elbow, he urged her forward on to the level turf above the sea. She wore the same black coat, the same indigo dress with the white collar. But whether it was because she had slipped, or he held her arm, or the colder air, I do not know, but her skin had a vigor, a pink bloom, that suited admirably the wild shyness of her demeanor. The wind had blown her hair a little loose; and she had a faint touch of a boy caught stealing apples from an orchard… a guilt, yet a mutinous guilt. Suddenly she looked at Charles, a swift sideways and upward glance from those almost exophthalmic dark-brown eyes with their clear whites: a look both timid and forbidding. It made him drop her arm.

“I dread to think, Miss Woodruff, what would happen if you should one day turn your ankle in a place like this.”

“It does not matter.”

“But it would most certainly matter, my dear young lady. From your request to me last week I presume you don’t wish Mrs. Poulteney to know you come here. Heaven forbid that I should ask for your reasons. But I must point out that if you were in some way disabled I am the only person in Lyme who could lead your rescuers to you. Am I not?”

“She knows. She would guess.”

“She knows you come here—to this very place?”

She stared at the turf, as if she would answer no more questions; begged him to go. But there was something in that face, which Charles examined closely in profile, that made him determine not to go. All in it had been sacrificed, he now realized, to the eyes. They could not conceal an intelligence, an independence of spirit; there was also a silent contradiction of any sympathy; a determination to be what she was. Delicate, fragile, arched eyebrows were then the fashion, but Sarah’s were strong, or at least unusually dark, almost the color of her hair, which made them seem strong, and gave her a faintly tomboyish air on occasion. I do not mean that she had one of those masculine, handsome, heavy-chinned faces popular in the Edwardian Age—the Gibson Girl type of beauty. Her face was well modeled, and completely feminine; and the suppressed intensity of her eyes was matched by the suppressed sensuality of her mouth, which was wide—and once again did not correspond with current taste, which veered between pretty little almost lipless mouths and childish cupid’s bows. Charles, like most men of his time, was still faintly under the influence of Lavater’s Physiognomy. He noted that mouth, and was not deceived by the fact that it was pressed unnaturally tight.

Echoes, that one flashed glance from those dark eyes had certainly roused in Charles’s mind; but they were not English ones. He associated such faces with foreign women—to be frank (much franker than he would have been to himself) with foreign beds. This marked a new stage of his awareness of Sarah. He had realized she was more intelligent and independent than she seemed; he now guessed darker qualities.

To most Englishmen of his age such an intuition of Sarah’s real nature would have been repellent; and it did very faintly repel—or at least shock—Charles. He shared enough of his contemporaries’ prejudices to suspect sensuality in any form; but whereas they would, by one of those terrible equations that take place at the behest of the superego, have made Sarah vaguely responsible for being born as she was, he did not. For that we can thank his scientific hobbies. Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviorism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane. I do not mean that Charles completely exonerated Sarah; but he was far less inclined to blame her than she might have imagined.

Partly then, his scientific hobbies… but Charles had also the advantage of having read—very much in private, for the book had been prosecuted for obscenity—a novel that had appeared in France some ten years before; a novel profoundly deterministic in its assumptions, the celebrated Madame Bovary. And as he looked down at the face beside him, it was suddenly, out of nowhere, that Emma Bovary’s name sprang into his mind. Such allusions are comprehensions; and temptations. That is why, finally, he did not bow and withdraw.

At last she spoke.

“I did not know you were here.”

“How should you?”

“I must return.”

And she turned. But he spoke quickly.

“Will you permit me to say something first? Something I have perhaps, as a stranger to you and your circumstances, no right to say.” She stood with bowed head, her back to him. “May I proceed?”

She was silent. He hesitated a moment, then spoke.

“Miss Woodruff, I cannot pretend that your circumstances have not been discussed in front of me… by Mrs. Tranter. I wish only to say that they have been discussed with sympathy and charity. She believes you are not happy in your present situation, which I am given to understand you took from force of circumstance rather than from a more congenial reason. I have known Mrs. Tranter only a very short time. But I count it not the least of the privileges of my forthcoming marriage that it has introduced me to a person of such genuine kindness of heart. I will come to the point. I am confident—”

He broke off as she looked quickly round at the trees behind them. Her sharper ears had heard a sound, a branch broken underfoot. But before he could ask her what was wrong, he too heard men’s low voices. But by then she had already acted; gathering up her skirt she walked swiftly over the grass to the east, some forty yards; and there disappeared behind a thicket of gorse that had crept out a little over the turf. Charles stood dumbfounded, a mute party to her guilt.

The men’s voices sounded louder. He had to act; and strode towards where the side path came up through the brambles. It was fortunate that he did, for just as the lower path came into his sight, so also did two faces, looking up; and both sharply surprised. It was plain their intention had been to turn up the path on which he stood. Charles opened his mouth to bid them good day; but the faces disappeared with astonishing quickness. He heard a hissed voice—“Run for ‘un, Jem!”—and the sound of racing footsteps. A few moments later there was an urgent low whistle, and the excited whimper of a dog. Then silence.

He waited a minute, until he was certain they had gone, then he walked round to the gorse. She stood pressed sideways against the sharp needles, her face turned away.

“They have gone. Two poachers, I fancy.”

She nodded, but continued to avoid his eyes. The gorse was in full bloom, the cadmium-yellow flowers so dense they almost hid the green. The air was full of their honeyed musk.