Bag and Baggage/John Darling’s Atonement

JOHN DARLING'S ATONEMENTA MAN of thirty and a young woman of eighteen, depressed from a rather aimless saunter in the wet, had paused, as by common consent, at a point where a field-path gave upon a stile, and thence upon rain-drowned flats. Behind them, half reluctantly abandoned, stood the comparative covert of hedgerows and a small coppice or two, rising blurred and phantasmic in the twilight; and in front yawned the desolation of a wild and shelterless marshland. Perhaps the contrast touched a dread sympathetic nerve in the girl. She appeared to shrink back from that sodden pool of blackness before her, in a panic something like a sleep-walker's, who wakes from warm sheets to find herself bewildered in the open night. Her vision was strained, looking out into it. She saw vague and indeterminate monsters there, writhing up and dissipating like smoke in the rain, and her heart was sick with alarm.
She sat on the stile, her skirt rolled up over her petticoat, her feet tucked under it. She was a fresh wholesome young body, inclining to plumpness, with pretty hair and blue honest eyes; but she was of a social grade obviously lower than her companion's—a farmer's daughter, in fact—a

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