'And me you.'
They both had happy dreams that night.
Outside, the stars were fierce with frost. The world hardened. In the bitter still air and the greenish moonlight the chapel and parsonage took on an unreal look, as if they were built of wavering, vanishing material, and stood somewhere outside space on a pale, crumbling shore.
Without, the dead slept, each alone, dreamless. Within, the lovers slept, each alone, but dreaming of a day when night should bring them home each to the other.
As the moon set, the shadows of the gravestones lengthened grotesquely, creeping and creeping as if they would dominate the world.
In the middle of the night Foxy awoke, and barked and whimpered in some dark terror, and would not be comforted.
Chapter 36
Hazel looked out next morning into a cold, hostile world. The wind had gone into its winter quarters, storming down from the top of the Mountain on to the parsonage and raging into the woods. That was why Edward and Hazel never heard the sounds—some of the most horrible of the English countryside—that rose, as the morning went on, from various parts of the lower woods, whiningly, greedily, ferociously, as the hounds cast about for scent. Once there was momentary uproar, but it sank again, and the Master was disappointed. They had not found. The Master was a big fleshy man with white eyelashes and little pig's eyes that might conceal a soul—or might not. Miss Amelia Clomber admired him, and had just ridden up to say, 'A good field. Everybody's here.' Then she saw Reddin in the distance, and waited for him to come up. She was flushed and breathless and quite silent—an extraordinary thing for her. He certainly was looking his best, with the new zest and youth that Hazel had given him heightening the blue of his eyes and giving an added hauteur of masculinity to his bearing. She would, as she watched him coming, cheerfully have become his mistress at a nod for the sake of those eyes and that hauteur.
He was entirely unconscious of it. He never was a vain man, and women were to him what a watch is to a child—something to be smashed, not studied. Also, his mind was busy about his coming interview with Edward. He was ludicrously at a loss what to say or do. Blows were the only answer he could think of to such a thing as Edward had said. But blows had lost him Hazel before, and he wanted her still. He was rather surprised at this, passion being satisfied. Still, as he reflected, passion was only in abeyance. Next May—
If Miss Clomber had seen his eyes then, she would probably have proposed to him. But he was looking away towards the heights where Edward's house was. There was in his mind a hint of better things.