“Miss Woodruff

“Miss Woodruff!” He raised his hat. “How come you here?”
“I saw you pass.”
He moved a little closer up the scree towards her. Again her bonnet was in her hand. Her hair, he noticed, was loose, as if she had been in wind; but there had been no wind. It gave her a kind of wildness, which the fixity of her stare at him aggravated. He wondered why he had ever thought she was not indeed slightly crazed.
“You have something ... to communicate to me?”
Again that fixed stare, but not through him, very much down at him. Sarah had one of those peculiar female faces that vary very much in their attractiveness; in accordance with some subtle chemistry of angle, light, mood. She was dramatically helped at this moment by an oblique shaft of wan sunlight that had found its way through a small rift in the clouds, as not infrequently happens in a late English afternoon. It lit her face, her figure standing before the entombing greenery behind her; and her face was suddenly very beautiful, truly beautiful, exquisitely grave and yet full of an inner, as well as outer, light. Charles recalled that it was just so that a peasant near Gavarnie, in the Pyrenees, had claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary standing on a deboulis beside his road . . . only a few weeks before Charles once passed that way. He was taken to the place; it had been most insignificant. But if such a figure as this had stood before him!
However, this figure evidently had a more banal mission. She delved into the pockets of her coat and presented to him, one in each hand, two excellent Micraster tests. He climbed close enough to distinguish them for what they were. Then he looked up in surprise at her unsmiling face. He remembered— he had talked briefly of paleontology, of the importance of sea urchins, at Mrs. Poulteney’s that morning. Now he stared again at the two small objects in her hands.
“Will you not take them?”
She wore no gloves, and their fingers touched. He exam-ined the two tests; but he thought only of the touch of those cold fingers.
“I am most grateful. They are in excellent condition.”
“They are what you seek?”
“Yes indeed.”
“They were once marine shells?”
He hesitated, then pointed to the features of the better of the two tests: the mouth, the ambulacra, the anus. As he talked, and was listened to with a grave interest, his disappro-val evaporated. The girl’s appearance was strange; but her mind—as two or three questions she asked showed—was very far from deranged. Finally he put the two tests carefully in his own pocket.
“It is most kind of you to have looked for them.”
“I had nothing better to do.”
“I was about to return. May I help you back to the path?”
But she did not move. “I wished also, Mr. Smithson, to thank you ... for your offer of assistance.”
“Since you refused it, you leave me the more grateful.”
There was a little pause. He moved up past her and parted the wall of ivy with his stick, for her to pass back. But she stood still, and still facing down the clearing.
“I should not have followed you.”
He wished he could see her face, but he could not.