or her heart being
at ease about the little girl upstairs she was mentally following Clym
on his journey. Having indulged in this imaginary peregrination for
some considerable interval, she became impressed with a sense of the
intolerable slowness of time. But she sat on. The moment then came
when she could scarcely sit longer; and it was like a satire on her
patience to remember that Clym could hardly have reached the inn as
yet. At last she went to the baby's bedside. The child was sleeping
soundly; but her imagination of possibly disastrous events at her
home, the predominance within her of the unseen over the seen,
agitated her beyond endurance. She could not refrain from going down
and opening the door. The rain still continued, the candlelight
falling upon the nearest drops and making glistening darts of them as
they descended across the throng of invisible ones behind. To plunge
into that medium was to plunge into water slightly diluted with air.
But the difficulty of returning to her house at this moment made her
all the more desirous of doing so: anything was better than suspense.
"I have come here well enough," she said, "and why shouldn't I go back
again? It is a mistake for me to be away."

She hastily fetched the infant, wrapped it up, cloaked herself as
before, and shoveling the ashes over the fire, to prevent accidents,
went into the open air. Pausing first to put the door key in its
old place behind the shutter, she resolutely turned her face to the
confronting pile of firmamental darkness beyond the palings, and
stepped into its midst. But Thomasin's imagination being so actively
engaged elsewhere, the night and the weather had for her no terror
beyond that of their actual discomfort and difficulty.

She was soon ascending Blooms-End valley and traversing the
undulations on the side of the hill. The noise of the wind over the
heath was shrill, and as if it whistled for joy at finding a night
so congenial as this. Sometimes the path led her to hollows between
thickets of tall and dripping bracken, dead, though not yet prostrate,
which enclosed her like a pool. When they were more than usually tall
she lifted the baby to the top of her head, that it might be out of
the reach of their drenching fronds. On higher ground, where the wind
was brisk and sustained, the rain flew in a level flight without
sensible descent, so that it was beyond all power to imagine the
remoteness of the point at which it le