"Humph!"
"And buried. From the iron bridge it's two miles and a quarter to Herbert Oddy's, that's the Bay Horse, am ah right, at Shelmersdyke. Three miles and three-quarters from Dyke to the Cock & Goat at Shapley Fell, am ah right?"
Masterman, never having been within a hundred miles of Yorkshire, puffed at his cigarette, and nodded moodily, "I suppose so" or "Yes, yes."
"From Arthur Brinkley's to th' iron bridge is one mile and a half and a bit, and from Arthur Brinkley's to Jury Cartright's is just four mile. He's dead, sir."
"Yes."
"And buried. Is that wrong? Am ah speaking wrong? No. It's a long step from yon, rough tramp for an old man."
Masterman—after giving sixpence to the pedlar who, uttering a benediction, pressed upon him a card of shirt buttons—said "Good evening," and walked out to be alone upon the road with his once angry but now penitent mind. "Kate, poor dear Kate!"
The sun was low down lolling near the horizon but there was an astonishing light upon the land. Cottage windows were blocks of solid gold in this lateral brilliance, shafts of shapely shade lay across leagues of fields, he could have counted every leaf among the rumpled boskage of the sycamores. A vast fan of indurated cloud, shell-like and pearly, was wavering over the western sky, but in the east were snowy rounded masses like fabulous balloons. At a cross road he stood by an old sign post, its pillar plastered with the faded bill of a long ago circus. He could read every word of it but when he turned away he found everything had become dimmer. The wind arose, the forest began to roar like a heaving beast. All verdurous things leaned one way. A flock of starlings flew over him with one movement and settled on a rolling elm. How lonely it was. He took off his hat. His skull was fearfully tender—he had dabbed it too hard with his hairbrush that morning. His hair was growing thin, like his youth and his desires.
What had become of Kate, where had she hidden? What would be the end of it all? He would never see her again. He disliked everything about her, except herself. Her clothes, her speech, her walk, the way she carried her umbrella, her reticence that was nothing if not conspicuous, her melancholy, her angular concrete piety, her hands—in particular he disliked her pale hands. She had a mind that was cultivated as perfunctorily as a kitchen garden, with ideas like roots or beans, hostilities like briars, and a fence of prudery as tough as hoops of galvanised iron. And yet he loved her—or almost. He was ready to love her, he wanted to, he wanted her; her deep but guarded devotion—it was limited but it was devotion—compelled that return from him. It was a passionate return. He had tried to mould that devotion into a form that could delight him—he had failed. He knew her now, he could peer into her craven soul as one peers into an empty bottle, with one eye. For her the opportunities afforded by freedom were but the preludes to misadventure. What a fool she was!
When he reached home Kate stood in darkness at the doorway of his house. He exclaimed with delight, her surprising presence was the very centre of his desire; he wanted to embrace her, loving her deeply inexplicably again, just in a moment.