The Forest Lovers

Leaving the high road on his right hand, Prosper struck over the heath

towards a solemn beech-wood, which he took to be the very threshold of

Morgraunt. As a fact it was no more than an outstretched finger of its

hand, by name Cadnam Thicket. He skirted this place, seeking an entry,

but found nothing to suit him for an hour or more. Then at last he

came to a gap in the sandy bank, and saw that a little mossy ride ran

straight in among the trees. He put his horse at the gap, and was soon

cantering happily through the wood. Thus he came short upon an

adventure. The path ran ahead of him in a tapering vista, but just

where it should meet in a point it broadened out suddenly so as to

make a double bay. The light fell splashing upon this cleared space,

and he saw what he saw.

This was a tall lady, richly dressed in some gauzy purple stuff,

dragging a dead man by the heels, and making a very bad business of

it. She was dainty to view, her hands and arms shone like white

marble; but apart from all this it was clear to Prosper that she

lacked the mere strength for the office she had proposed herself. The

dead man was not very tall, but he was too tall for the lady. The

roughness of the ground, the resistance of the underwood, the

incapacity of the performers, made the procession unseemly.

Prosper, forgetting Brother Bonaccord, quickened his horse to a

gallop, and was soon up with the toiling lady. She stopped when she

heard him coming, stood up to wait for him, quick-breathing and a

little flushed, and never took her eyes off him.

It was clearly a time for discretion: so much she signalled from her

brown eyes, which were watchful, but by no means timid. He remembered

afterwards that they had been apt to fall easily into set stares, and

thus to give her a bold look which seemed to invite you to be bold

also. But though he could not see this now, and though he had no taste

for women, it was certain she was handsome in a profuse way. She had a

broad full bust; her skin, dazzling white at the neck, ran into golden

russet before it reached the burnt splendour of her cheeks; her mouth,

rather long and curved up at the corners, had lips rich and crimson;

of which, however, the upper was short to a fault, and so curled back

as to give her, a pettish or fretful look. Her dark hair, which was

plentiful and drawn low over her ears into a heavy knot at the nape of

her neck, was dressed within a fine gold net. Her arms were bare to

the elbow, large and snowy white; from her fingers gems and gold

flashed at him. Prosper, who knew nothing whatever about it, judged

her midway between thirty and forty. Such was the lady; the man he had

no chance of overlooking, for the other had dropped her handkerchief

upon his face before she left him. "Sir," she now said, in a smooth

and distinguishable voice, when Prosper had saluted her, "you may do

me a great service if you will, which is to carry this dead man to his

grave in the wood."