"He's at Newton's," Potch said. "Which way did Sophie go?"
"She went towards the Old Town, Potch," Martha said.
The chestnut Arthur Henty had brought for Sophie, still standing with reins over a post of the goat-pen, whinnied when he saw them at the door of the hut. Potch looked at him as if he were wondering why the horse was there—a vague perplexity defined itself through the troubled abstraction of his gaze. His eyes went to Martha as if asking her how the horse came to be there; but she did not offer any explanation. She went off down the track to Newton's, and he struck out towards the Old Town.
Potch wandered over the plains looking for Sophie. She was not in any of her usual haunts. He wandered, looking for her, calling her, wondering what this news would mean to her. Vaguely, instinctively he knew. Prom the time of their marriage nothing had been said between them of Arthur Henty.
"Sophie! Sophie!" he called.
The stars were swarming points of silver fire in the blue-black sky. He wandered, calling still. Desolation overwhelmed him because he could not find Sophie; because she was in none of the places they had spent so much time in together. It was significant that she should not be in any of them, he felt. He could not bear to think she was eluding him, and yet that was what she had done all her life. She had been with him, smiling, elfish and tender one moment, and gone the next. She had always been elusive. For a long time a presentiment of desolation and disaster had overshadowed him. Again and again he had been able to draw breath of relief and assure himself that the indefinable dread which was always with him was a chimera of his too absorbing, too anxious love. But the fear, instinctive, prophetic, begotten by consciousness of the slight grasp he had of her, had remained.
That morning even, before he had gone off to work, she had taken his face in her hands. He had seen tenderness and an infinite gentleness in her eyes.
"Dear Potch," she had said, and kissed him.
She had withdrawn from him before the faint chill which her words and the light pressure of her lips diffused, had left him. And now he was wandering over the plains looking for her, calling her.... He had done so before.... Sophie liked to wander off like this by herself. Sometimes he had found her in a place where they often sat together; sometimes she had been in the hut before him; sometimes she had come in a long time after him, wearily, a strange, remote expression on her face, as if long gazing at the stars or into the darkness which overhung the plains had deprived her of some earthliness.
He did not know how long he walked over the plains and along the Ridge, looking for her, his soul in that cry: