evening lent
a fascination to the experience. There is a certain degree and tone
of light which tends to disturb the equilibrium of the senses, and to
promote dangerously the tenderer moods; added to movement, it drives
the emotions to rankness, the reason becoming sleepy and unperceiving in
inverse proportion; and this light fell now upon these two from the disc
of the moon. All the dancing girls felt the symptoms, but Eustacia most
of all. The grass under their feet became trodden away, and the hard,
beaten surface of the sod, when viewed aslant towards the moonlight,
shone like a polished table. The air became quite still, the flag above
the wagon which held the musicians clung to the pole, and the players
appeared only in outline against the sky; except when the circular
mouths of the trombone, ophicleide, and French horn gleamed out like
huge eyes from the shade of their figures. The pretty dresses of the
maids lost their subtler day colours and showed more or less of a misty
white. Eustacia floated round and round on Wildeve's arm, her face
rapt and statuesque; her soul had passed away from and forgotten her
features, which were left empty and quiescent, as they always are when
feeling goes beyond their register.

How near she was to Wildeve! it was terrible to think of. She could feel
his breathing, and he, of course, could feel hers. How badly she had
treated him! yet, here they were treading one measure. The enchantment
of the dance surprised her. A clear line of difference divided like
a tangible fence her experience within this maze of motion from her
experience without it. Her beginning to dance had been like a change
of atmosphere; outside, she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by
comparison with the tropical sensations here. She had entered the dance
from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant
chamber after a night walk in a wood. Wildeve by himself would have been
merely an agitation; Wildeve added to the dance, and the moonlight, and
the secrecy, began to be a delight. Whether his personality supplied the
greater part of this sweetly compounded feeling, or whether the dance
and the scene weighed the more therein, was a nice point upon which
Eustacia herself was entirely in a cloud.

People began to say "Who are they?" but no invidious inquiries were
made. Had Eustacia mingled with the other girls in their ordinary
daily walks the case would have been different: here she wa