He went, and found Maggie perfectly well. The postal orders had not come, because the last lady, the lady with the title, had not paid her. Maggie was good as gold again, placid and at peace.
"Why," he asked himself bitterly, "why did I not leave her to her peace?"
And a still more bitter voice answered, "Why not you, as well as anybody else?"
BOOK III
CHAPTER XXVIII
Eastward along the Humber, past the brown wharves and the great square blocks of the warehouses, past the tall chimneys and the docks with their thin pine-forest of masts, there lie the forlorn flat lands of Holderness. Field after field, they stretch, lands level as water, only raised above the river by a fringe of turf and a belt of silt and sand. Earth and water are of one form and of one colour, for, beyond the brown belt, the widening river lies like a brown furrowed field, with a clayey gleam on the crests of its furrows. When the grey days come, water and earth and sky are one, and the river rolls sluggishly, as if shores and sky oppressed it, as if it took its motion from the dragging clouds.
Eleven miles from Scale a thin line of red roofs runs for a field's length up the shore, marking the neck of the estuary. It is the fishing hamlet of Fawlness. Its one street lies on the flat fields low and straight as a dyke.
Beyond the hamlet there is a little spit of land, and beyond the spit of land a narrow creek.