But she did not move. “I wished also, Mr. Smithson, to thank you… for your offer of assistance.”

“Since you refused it, you leave me the more grateful.”

There was a little pause. He moved up past her and parted the wall of ivy with his stick, for her to pass back. But she stood still, and still facing down the clearing.

“I should not have followed you.”

He wished he could see her face, but he could not.

“I think it is better if I leave.”

She said nothing, and he turned towards the ivy. But he could not resist a last look back at her. She was staring back over her shoulder at him, as if body disapproved of face and turned its back on such shamelessness; because her look, though it still suggested some of the old universal reproach, now held an intensity that was far more of appeal. Her eyes were anguished… and anguishing; an outrage in them, a weakness abominably raped. They did not accuse Charles of the outrage, but of not seeing that it had taken place. A long moment of locked eyes; and then she spoke to the ground between them, her cheeks red.

“I have no one to turn to.”

“I hoped I had made it clear that Mrs. Tranter—”

“Has the kindest heart. But I do not need kindness.”

There was a silence. He still stood parting the ivy.

“I am told the vicar is an excellently sensible man.”

“It was he who introduced me to Mrs. Poulteney.”

Charles stood by the ivy, as if at a door. He avoided her eyes; sought, sought for an exit line.

“If I can speak on your behalf to Mrs. Tranter, I shall be most happy… but it would be most improper of me to…”

“Interest yourself further in my circumstances.”

“That is what I meant to convey, yes.” Her reaction was to look away; he had reprimanded her. Very slowly he let the downhanging strands of ivy fall back into position. “You haven’t reconsidered my suggestion—that you should leave this place?”

“If I went to London, I know what I should become.” He stiffened inwardly. “I should become what so many women who have lost their honor become in great cities.” Now she turned fully towards him. Her color deepened. “I should become what some already call me in Lyme.”

It was outrageous, most unseemly. He murmured, “My dear Miss Woodruff…” His own cheeks were now red as well.

“I am weak. How should I not know it?” She added bitterly, “I have sinned.”

This new revelation, to a stranger, in such circumstances—it banished the good the attention to his little lecture on fossil sea urchins had done her in his eyes. But yet he felt the two tests in his pockets; some kind of hold she had on him; and a Charles in hiding from himself felt obscurely flattered, as a clergyman does whose advice is sought on a spiritual problem.

He stared down at the iron ferrule of his ashplant.

“Is this the fear that keeps you at Lyme?”

“In part.”

“That fact you told me the other day as you left. Is anyone else apprised of it?”

“If they knew, they would not have missed the opportunity of telling me.”

There was a longer silence. Moments like modulations come in human relationships: when what has been until then an objective situation, one perhaps described by the mind to itself in semiliterary terms, one it is sufficient merely to classify under some general heading (man with alcoholic problems, woman with unfortunate past, and so on) becomes subjective; becomes unique; becomes, by empathy, instantaneously shared rather than observed. Such a metamorphosis took place in Charles’s mind as he stared at the bowed head of the sinner before him. Like most of us when such moments come—who has not been embraced by a drunk?—he sought for a hasty though diplomatic restoration of the status quo.

“I am most sorry for you. But I must confess I don’t understand why you should seek to… as it were… make me your confidant.”

She began then—as if the question had been expected—to speak rapidly; almost repeating a speech, a litany learned by heart.

“Because you have traveled. Because you are educated. Because you are a gentleman. Because… because, I do not know, I live among people the world tells me are kind, pious, Christian people. And they seem to me crueler than the cruelest heathens, stupider than the stupidest animals. I cannot believe that the truth is so. That life is without understanding or compassion. That there are not spirits generous enough to understand what I have suffered and why I suffer… and that, whatever sins I have committed, it is not right that I should suffer so much.” There was silence. Unprepared for this articulate account of her feelings, this proof, already suspected but not faced, of an intelligence beyond convention, Charles said nothing. She turned away and went on in a quieter voice. “My only happiness is when I sleep. When I wake, the nightmare begins. I feel cast on a desert island, imprisoned, condemned, and I know not what crime it is for.”

Charles looked at her back in dismay, like a man about to be engulfed by a landslide; as if he would run, but could not; would speak, but could not.

Her eyes were suddenly on his. “Why am I born what I am? Why am I not born Miss Freeman?” But the name no sooner passed her lips than she turned away, conscious that she had presumed too much.

“That question were better not asked.”

“I did not mean to…”

“Envy is forgivable in your—”

“Not envy. Incomprehension.”

“It is beyond my powers—the powers of far wiser men than myself—to help you here.”

“I do not—I will not believe that.”

Charles had known women—frequently Ernestina herself—contradict him playfully. But that was in a playful context. A woman did not contradict a man’s opinion when he was being serious unless it were in carefully measured terms. Sarah seemed almost to assume some sort of equality of intellect with him; and in precisely the circumstances where she should have been most deferential if she wished to encompass her end. He felt insulted, he felt… he could not say. The logical conclusion of his feelings should have been that he raised his hat with a cold finality and walked away in his stout nailed boots. But he stood where he was, as if he had taken root. Perhaps he had too fixed an idea of what a siren looked like and the circumstances in which she appeared—long tresses, a chaste alabaster nudity, a mermaid’s tail, matched by an Odysseus with a face acceptable in the best clubs. There were no Doric temples in the Undercliff; but here was a Calypso.

She murmured, “Now I have offended you.”

“You bewilder me, Miss Woodruff. I do not know what you can expect of me that I haven’t already offered to try to effect for you. But you must surely realize that any greater intimacy… however innocent in its intent… between us is quite impossible in my present circumstances.”

There was a silence; a woodpecker laughed in some green recess, mocking those two static bipeds far below.

“Would I have… thrown myself on your mercy in this way if I were not desperate?”

“I don’t doubt your despair. But at least concede the impossibility of your demand.” He added, “Whose exact nature I am still ignorant of.”

“I should like to tell you of what happened eighteen months ago.”

A silence. She looked to see his reaction. Again Charles stiffened. The invisible chains dropped, and his conventional side triumphed. He drew himself up, a monument to suspicious shock, rigidly disapproving; yet in his eyes a something that searched hers… an explanation, a motive… he thought she was about to say more, and was on the point of turning through the ivy with no more word. But as if she divined his intention, she did, with a forestalling abruptness, the most unexpected thing. She sank to her knees.

Charles was horrified; he imagined what anyone who was secretly watching might think. He took a step back, as if to keep out of view. Strangely, she seemed calm. It was not the kneeling of a hysteric. Only the eyes were more intense: eyes without sun, bathed in an eternal moonlight.