On this morning as he went down over the fields to Mrs. Penticost's he was more uneasy than ever before--he knew it was not his imagination that she had been different these last few days; he began to be beset by vague fears to which he had not dared give form even in his own mind, much less in any speech with her. Yet since the dance he had faced the conclusion that they could not go on as they were, that Blanche must either agree to a wedding or a final parting....
He reached the cottage and had to wait awhile till Blanche, pale and grave, came to him in the little parlour.
"Come out," he said to her. "There's a lot of things I want to say, and I can't here. The room's too small."
Blanche hesitated, seemed to be weighing something in her mind, and then agreed docilely; she put on a hat, and then went beside him towards the cliff. As they went Ishmael tried to take her hand, trying to capture with it some of the spirit of joy which had fled, but she was carrying a little bag, which she snatched away; there came from it a crackle as of a letter.... They went down on to the cliff together and stood awhile in a speechless constraint among the withered bracken.
It was a day of sunlight so faint it seemed dead, like some gleam refracted onto the pale bright sky, and so to earth, rather than any direct outflow; the quiet air was only stirred by the swish of scythes from the sloping cliff where two men cut the crisp bracken down for litter for cattle. The time of year had fallen upon rust--brown-rust were the bells of the dried heath, the spires of wall-pennywort that lurked in the crannies of the boulders; blood-rust were the wisps of dead sorrel that stood up into the sunlight; fawn-rust were the hemlocks with their spidery umbels, and a deader fawn were the masses of seeded hemp-agrimony, whose once plumy heads were now become mere frothy tufts of down, that blew against Blanche's dress as she passed, and clung there.
Swish-swish ... came the even sweep of the scythes, a whispering sound that irritated Blanche and somehow disarranged her carefully-prepared sentences before ever they had a chance to reach her tongue. She felt that here, on the rust-red cliff, with that deadly scything sounding in their ears, Ishmael would get the better of her, and she turned through the bracken to where an overgrown track led to what had once been a series of tiny gardens set on the cliff and walled in with thick elder. There at least they could be hidden from the eyes of any stray labourers, and with less space about her she felt she would find her task easier. Ishmael followed her with a heart that warned him of dread to come. Always afterwards he avoided those dead gardens on the cliff that he had been wont to like to wander in.