'At any rate,' she said sighing, 'it seemed to me that it might divert her thoughts a little from the actual horror of her own summons. Anything is better than the torture of that one fixed idea as she lies there.'
'What is that?' said Robert, startled a little by some ghostly sounds in front of them. The little wood was almost dark, and he could see nothing.
'Only a horse trotting on in front of us,' said Catherine; 'our voices frightened him, I suppose. We shall be out on the fell again directly.'
And as they quitted the trees, a dark bulky form to the left suddenly lifted a shadowy head from the grass, and clattered down the slope.
A cluster of white-stemmed birches just ahead of them caught whatever light was still left in the atmosphere, their feathery tops bending and swaying against the sky.
'How easily, with mind attuned, one could people this whole path with ghosts!' said Robert. 'Look at those stems, and that line of stream coming down to the right, and listen to the wind among the fern.'
For they were passing a little gully deep in bracken, up which the blast was tearing its tempestuous way.
Catherine shivered a little, and the sense of physical exhaustion, which had been banished like everything else—doubt, humiliation, bitterness—by the one fact of his presence, came back on her.
'There is something rather awful in this dark and storm,' she said, and paused.
'Would you have faced it alone?' he asked, his voice thrilling her with a hundred different meanings. 'I am glad I prevented it.'