ght, stepping into the porch.

"I would fain go with 'ee," said the old man doubtfully. "But I begin to
be afraid that my legs will hardly carry me there such a night as this.
I am not so young as I was. If they are interrupted in their flight
she will be sure to come back to me, and I ought to be at the house to
receive her. But be it as 'twill I can't walk to the Quiet Woman, and
that's an end on't. I'll go straight home."

"It will perhaps be best," said Clym. "Thomasin, dry yourself, and be as
comfortable as you can."

With this he closed the door upon her, and left the house in company
with Captain Vye, who parted from him outside the gate, taking the
middle path, which led to Mistover. Clym crossed by the right-hand track
towards the inn.

Thomasin, being left alone, took off some of her wet garments, carried
the baby upstairs to Clym's bed, and then came down to the sitting-room
again, where she made a larger fire, and began drying herself. The fire
soon flared up the chimney, giving the room an appearance of comfort
that was doubled by contrast with the drumming of the storm without,
which snapped at the windowpanes and breathed into the chimney strange
low utterances that seemed to be the prologue to some tragedy.

But the least part of Thomasin was in the house, for 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 should