Laura, fever-driven, trailing through the dust-white grass that edged the high-road, wrenching as she went, with a sort of aimless cruelty, at the dripping tansy heads and trails of dewberries, felt the flying water-drops soak through her thin sleeves and spray up on to her face, and shivered and burned again, and had no good of them. Yet the riot within her was dying out: her mood was as desolate as the hour. She had ceased fighting. She acknowledged her duty: was set (and therein lay her fever) upon doing it. She had only come out because in the open she could breathe more easily, think more clearly, and because ... because ... (here, if she had been speaking aloud, would have come the high note) because she could not bear her bedroom any longer. But it was not because she doubted, was questioning her duty. That was settled. That—she would not think of it—but that she had settled, with herself, last night. But that inexorable self had left to her own decision (because she knew him so well—so well) how best to hurt Justin—to hurt him.
And so—let us sit down, oh, my thoughts, not masters any more, but weary servants of my will, and discover how best we may hurt Justin.... Because it is to do him good—to wake him up. That is settled, though.... No need to go into that.... Some need though—if only to satisfy rebellious thoughts! You do not ask a woman to tear her heart out of her body for honour or justice or repentance’ sake——But if it be for Justin? Let us find out quickly, before we grow selfish again, what will hurt our Justin.... Not a little thing.... A big thing.... A big thing to him.... A thing he will never forget—or forgive....
From the bend of the road a pitter-pat and clatter of wheels warned her that the market carts would be passing, and at the next gate she turned aside into the fields that fringed the Priory woods.
She wandered through the sleeping corn, following the footways, and so came at last to the familiar unregarded notice boards and the high tarred gate, and the hurdles that held back the trees as a rope checks the straining populace at a procession. And as there the children will be always slipping under it and out into the cleared way, so ever and again there were patches of polled hazel and seedling oak and yard-high bracken running out into the no-man’s-land between the hedgerow and the plough.
The place was thick with ghostly summer flowers—mallow, scarcely visible, foxglove and corncockle and knapweed, bled of their hearty crimsons by the vampire night, and all the little pink and yellow field flowers, dim white as the huge empty sky yawning over them.
She stood a moment uncertainly by the padlocked gate, and then, with a vague gesture, waded through the strip of bracken and, sitting down, let herself sink backward into the deeps of the hedge. The foxgloves and the sorrel swayed and shook above her and she pulled them down to her for their freshness’ sake, and let them spring free again, and then lay back once more, her lips besmeared with dew and pollen, her hands clasped under her head, and watched the mists, not rising from the earth but thinning and vanishing where they lay, and the grey surface of the corn warming to bronze-tipped green, and the dawn-light spreading like a smile across the sky, and had no answering smile for it, but turned where she lay, stopping her ears against the riot of the birds, hiding her face from the sun, and at last falling, for very weariness, into a cramped, uneasy drowse.
It was roaring day without a dew-drop left in the open when she woke. She lay a moment confused. Vague thrills ran like ants up and down her body and soul, and her stupor thinned and vanished like the night mists two hours before. She had sunk through the yielding green stuff and her body had pressed so heavily against the damp, stony earth that she felt as if she were clamped to it. Her first movement set her shivering with pain and cold. Yet her linen frock was bone dry where the sunshine had beaten down on it, shiny and hot to the touch. Fern-flies rose buzzing from it as she moved stiffly in her place.
The footsteps—she realized that the sound of footsteps had awakened her—drew nearer. A labourer going to work? She pulled a fan of bracken across her face. Her frock was green and the brishwood high: it would be mere ill-luck if she were seen. When he had passed she would get up and go home, out of the glare. One could not think in the glare, and she had come out to think ... to think about Justin ... to plan—what was the plan?...
She put her cold hand to her head, and then dropped it again, stiffening where she lay. She knew that step, that whistle. Yet what should Justin do here? Unless—unless—could he, too, have had his sleepless night?...
He had stopped a dozen yards away from her. Through the bracken stalks she could see his arrested pose, his lifted head. He was shading his eyes with his hand, listening and staring about him.