ied herself like a huntress; slender
and quick, with high, sharp-pointed breasts. She looked at him as she
passed and her face was wide-eyed and luminous under the moon. Her
lips were parted with her speed, so that, instinctively, his hands
tightened on the reins as if he had thought that she was going to
speak to him. But of course she did not speak.

He looked back and saw her swing off the high road and go up Karva. A
flock of mountain sheep started from their couches on the heather and
looked at her, and she went driving them before her. They trailed up
Karva slowly, in a long line, gray in the moonlight. Their mournful,
musical voices came to him from the hill.

He saw her again late--incredibly late--that night as the moon swept
from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from
her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and
waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high
road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his
horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he
drew himself upright and looked straight at her as she passed him. She
flashed by like a huntress, like Artemis carrying the young moon on
her forehead. From the turn of her head and the even falling of her
feet he felt her unconscious of his existence. And her unconsciousness
was hateful to him. It wiped him clean out of the universe of
noticeable things.

The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth. And he said to
himself. "Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at
night and isn't afraid?"

* * * * *

He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the
high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect
and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when
he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses
as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved.
And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun."

The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts
and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs,
half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm
getting on. She's aware of me all right."

She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from
Upthorne. He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at
dawn.