"Still waiting, are you, my lady?" he murmured.

However, he did not proceed that way just then; but leaving the hill
to the left of him, he stumbled over a rutted road that brought him to
a cottage which, like all other habitations on the heath at this hour,
was only saved from being visible by a faint shine from its bedroom
window. This house was the home of Olly Dowden, the besom-maker, and
he entered.

The lower room was in darkness; but by feeling his way he found a
table, whereon he placed the bottle, and a minute later emerged again
upon the heath. He stood and looked north-east at the undying little
fire--high up above him, though not so high as Rainbarrow.

We have been told what happens when a woman deliberates; and the
epigram is not always terminable with woman, provided that one be in
the case, and that a fair one. Wildeve stood, and stood longer, and
breathed perplexedly, and then said to himself with resignation,
"Yes--by Heaven, I must go to her, I suppose!"

Instead of turning in the direction of home he pressed on rapidly by a
path under Rainbarrow towards what was evidently a signal light.

VI

The Figure against the Sky

When the whole Egdon concourse had left the site of the bonfire to its
accustomed loneliness, a closely wrapped female figure approached the
barrow from that quarter of the heath in which the little fire lay.
Had the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her as the
woman who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the
approach of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top,
where the red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes
in the corpse of day. There she stood still, around her stretching the
vast night atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with
the total darkness of the heath below it might have represented a
venial beside a mortal sin.

That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in
her movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form
being wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and
her head in a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this
hour and place. Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the
north-west; but whether she had avoided that aspect because of the
chilly gusts which played about her exceptional position, or because
her interest lay in the south-east, did not at first appear.

Her reason for standing so dead