They sauntered out through the orchard to the wood-road that led eastward from the Four Corners.
There was a section of Middleton dominated by a high hill, with a country pond at its foot, that possessed an air of distinction, of being apart from the flat village and the small barren farms. High stone-walls ribbed its green surfaces, meeting in a heap at the top, where also a few wind-blown apple-trees maintained their stunted growth. A little below the crown of the hill there was a thick cluster of nut-trees. From this height one could see the Hampton hills to the east, outlined by a thin row of trees drawn as if with a heavy brush along the margin of the landscape. Elsewhere the hills were rounded bare mounds. Farther north this undulating line dipped into a green plain, and there, so the tradition ran, you could see on a clear day the white sails of coasting schooners and a shimmer of eastern light that might be the marshes of Essex, or indeed the blue sea itself. This apple-tree crowned peak was a kind of lookout from the dead country to the living sea.
Miss Ellwell brought Thornton out at the mound of stones on the crest; they rested their arms on the wall, looking east searchingly for the bit of blue coast and the sails.
"There, there, I can see it," she cried. He looked at her incredulously. There was nothing but a nebulous mass of blue. "Well, I have seen it," she protested, "two or three times. To-day it is a bit hazy."
"Why do you want to see it?" he asked, idly.
"Oh, it is so different! It is big and strange and unfamiliar; don't you like it?"
"'There is a world beyond!'" He answered without direct appositeness. They turned to the shade of the nut-trees. In the July sun the woods seemed asleep, merely soothed by a wandering breeze, and they flung themselves down on the warm ground. All about the air swam with pleasant, heated, drowsy, earthy odors.
As she took off her hat and nestled back into the undergrowth, Thornton felt her anæmic body, pale from the fatigue of the hot walk, as if the water-lily were drooping in the mid-day sun. Yet she was somehow intimately connected with the brooding earth. There were two bodies—the body of flesh that had come with fatigue and feebleness into the world, and the body of passion that was blooming into power.
She talked of the thousand trivialities that go to make the conversation between a man and a woman. Thornton lay silently, stretched on the warm leaves at her feet, feeling her bloodless face with its sharp blue veining. Each was conscious of a dynamic something in the air; their minds had a frank understanding while the talk skipped in and out among nothings. When she began once more to talk of the sea that lay down there beyond the green meadows and the blue haze, a faint rose-color of animation darted over the pallor and made the moist eyes flash. The sea! That stood in her mind for the mysteries of change, of the unknown. Thornton knew that this wistfulness after change had nothing definite in it, was merely a girl's hunger for motion; yet that had divided her in his mind from her kind.
"There is a world beyond," she murmured, in wondering repetition of his words. The branches of the nut-trees swayed in the odorous wind as if whispering, "Yes, yes, we know of it. That world beyond ... over the hills of flesh, and the tedious wastes of tired bodies, there is a world of peace beyond!"