 view of them
something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for their two
natures; something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have
despised, as a practical man; yet which was based upon a more stubborn and
resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities. A veil had
been whisked aside; the tract of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon
thenceforward - for a short time or for a long.
 
                             End Of Phase The Third
 

                                Phase the Fourth

                                The Consequence

                                      XXV

Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who had won
him having retired to her chamber.
    The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness after dark unless
on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the barton-walls were warm
as hearths, and reflected the noontide temperature into the noctambulist's face.
    He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think of
himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgment that day.
    Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept apart. She
seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred, while the novelty,
unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance disquieted him - palpitating,
contemplative being that he was. He could hardly realize their true relations to
each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing should be before third parties
thenceforward.
    Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed through and
early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which as from a screened alcove
he could calmly view the absorbing world without, and, apostrophizing it with
Walt Whitman -
 
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
How curious you are to me! -
 
resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But, behold, the
absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the engrossing world had
dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here, in this apparently
dim and unimpassioned place, novelty had volcanically started up, as it had
never, for him, started up elsewhere.
    Every window of the house being open Clare could hear across the yard each
trivial sound of the retiring household. That dairy-house, so humble, so
insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had never
hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be reconnoitred as an object of
any quality whatever in the landscape; what was it now
