This is the road that since the summer—since their parting—she shunned, for fear of meeting him.

Until the time of ripening their quarrel lasted, and in September, when the harvest

was brimming in the fields, she went her way by other paths. Through any opening gate

he suddenly might come, on a waggon loaded with tousled grain; and when mists of a mild October

crawled on the sodden soil, he would be cutting his straggled hedges, time-serving till the sullen

fallow land should harden with more than the first gossamer frost, and open to winter work.

But today she takes that road in the late afternoon when already across the bloodshot sky the rooks

are blinking home. She is no longer afraid while the year lasts, knowing the watchdog daylight

whines in November on a shortened leash. She holds her scarf tightened along her cheek;

her worn shoes make no noise but a crisp soft crushing of frozen grass and ivy and dock,

that keep her footsteps, still as a pattern in damask. She moves in the ditch of the drab lane, patched with agate

ice-pools, dried after sharp showers by a long sweeping wind. Her ears tell that beyond

the sheltering hedge two horses—a stubble-dappled roan, and a mare as red as springing sally

whips or a burnt-out beech—are treading the dead-branch crumbling clay, that breaks against the metal

harrow's teeth… He shouts to make them turn; behind him turns a cloud of white sea-birds…

She keeps to the near ditch; but the road winding and bending again shows a new-made breach in the briars.

At the treacherous gap she stops. Oh! now to run, to hide like a feathered frightened thing in the dusk!

But she who thought to pass like a bird or a bat, encountering only the hedge-high gulls, is trapped:

for the too-familiar face, the known shape walking the furrows, are seen… So it was vain

to shield evasive eyes, to discipline rebellious feet: vain to her and to him

the fugitive pretence. For a proud pulse beats in her brain like a startled wing; the blood

tramples its path in the stubborn heart's field with the eightfold stamping hooves of a strong team

of horses; and she feels, raking the flesh, the harrow of love's remembered violence.