"The moon was climbing up above the mists, and among them huddled the still shapes of the sleeping country, dim outlines of woods and stacks and hedges. Here and there a star winked across the fields from a farmhouse window, or a pond caught the faint, fog-thickened light of the moon. There was no wind, only a catch of frost on the motionless air, and the mist had muffled all the lanes into silence, so that even the small sounds of the night—the barking of a dog at Bantony, the trot of hoofs on the highroad, the far-off scream and groan of a train, the suck of all the Fullers' feet in the mud—were hushed to something even fainter than the munch of cows on the other side of the hedge."

Or this: "The mists had sunk into the earth or shredded into the sky, and the distances that had been blurred since twilight were now almost frostily keen of outline and colour. The air was thinly sweet-scented with the sodden earth, with the moist, golden leaves, with the straw of rick and barn-roof made pungent by dew."

Robert Fuller of Bodingmares falls in love with Hannah Iden, a gipsy, who is not so easy to conquer as the other girls he had made love to.... "'I want her, Clem,'" he says to his brother. "'She's lovely ... her mouth makes my mouth ache ... she smells of grass ... and her eyes in the shadder—they mäake me want to drownd myself. I wish her eyes wur water and I could drownd myself in 'em.'"

Eventually she gives in to his importunity.

"'I love her,' said Robert, 'not because she's sweet, but because I can't help it; surelye ... she'll let me love her—that's all I ask. All I ask is fur her to täake me and let me love her.... She döan't want a boy to love her—she wants a man.... Hannah wurn't born to mäake men happy—she wur born to mäake them men.'"

Clem, the young brother, is unhappy about Robert and confronts Hannah, who retorts: "'You're afraid of me because I've taught your Bob how to love, as none of the silly, fat young girls in this place have taught him.... I could teach you how to love, little hedgehog, if I hadn't your brother for scholard.'"

"For long afterwards her shadow seemed to lie on the dusk—on the wet gleam of the road, on the twigs and spines of the thorny hedges, on the clear sky with its spatter of yellow rain. Yet it was not her beauty which defiled, but the cruelty in which it was rooted like a rose-tree in dung.... Her crude physical power would not have disgusted him if it had had its accustomed growth out of a healthy instinct.... She was like the bitter kernel of a ripe, sweet fruit—she was the hard stone of Nature's heart...."

All the same she contributed to Clem's own manhood, for it is not long after that he holds his own sweetheart Polly, despite her struggling, and loves her like a man at last with a passion that is not free from fierceness. So he at any rate achieves his happiness in marriage and becomes Polly's "dear Clemmy ... his sweetness and gentleness were fundamental—a deep gratitude stirred in her heart, making her take his dark, woolly head in her hands and kiss it with the slow, reverent kisses of a thankful child, and then suddenly find herself the mother with that head upon her breast."

But Robert finds no such happiness with his gipsy love.

"'Nannie, you're cruel—I can't mäake you out. You let me love you, and I'm full of heaven, but in between whiles you're no more'n a lady acquaintance.'"