Bycars Lane, though free from mud, was everywhere heavily bedewed.  The narrow pavement glistened.  The roofs glistened.  Drops of water hung on all the edges of the great gas-lamp beneath her, which was still defying the dawn.  The few miserable trees and bushes on the vague lands beyond the lane were dripping with water.  The sky was low and heavy, in scarcely distinguishable shades of purplish grey, and Bycars Pool, of which she had a glimpse, appeared in its smooth blackness to be not more wet than the rest of the scene.  Nothing stirred.  Not the tiniest branch stirred on the leafless trees, nor a leaf on a grey rhododendron-bush in a front garden below.  Every window within sight had its blind drawn.  No smoke rose from any house-chimney, and the distant industrial smoke on the horizon hung in the lower air, just under the clouds, undecided and torpid.  The wet air was moveless, and yet she could feel it impinging with its cool, sharp humidity on her cheek.

The sensation of this contact was delicious.  She was surrounded, not by the slatternly Five Towns landscape and by the wretchedness of the familiar bedroom, but by the unanswerable, intimidating, inspiring mystery of life itself.  A man came hurrying with a pole out of the western vista of the lane, and stopped in front of the gas-lamp, and in an instant the flame was reduced to a little fat worm of blue, and the man passed swiftly up the lane, looking straight ahead with bent shoulders, and was gone.  Never before had Rachel actually seen the lamp put out.  Never before had she noticed, as she noticed now, that the lamp had a number, an identity—­1054.  The meek acquiescence of the lamp, and the man’s preoccupied haste, seemed to bear some deep significance, which, however, she could not seize.  But the aspect of the man afflicted her, she did not know why.

Then a number of other figures, in a long spasmodic procession, passed up the lane after the man, and were gone out of sight.  Their heavy boots clacked on the pavement.  They wore thick, dirty greyish-black clothes, but no overcoats; small tight caps in their hands, and dark kerchiefs round their necks:  about thirty of them in all, colliers on their way to one of the pits on the Moorthorne ridge.  They walked quickly, but they did not hurry as their forerunner hurried.  Several of them smoked pipes.  Though some walked in pairs, none spoke; none looked up or aside.  With one man walked stolidly a young woman, her overskirt raised and pulled round her head from the back for a shawl; but even these two did not converse.  The procession closed with one or two stragglers.  Rachel had never seen these pilgrims before, but she had heard them; and Mrs. Maldon had been acquainted with all their footfalls.  They were tragic to Rachel; they infected her with the most recondite horror of existence; they left tragedy floating behind them in the lane like an invisible but oppressive cloud.  Their utterly incurious indifference to Rachel in her peignoir at the window was somehow harrowing.