How near she was to Wildeve! it was terrible to think of.  She could feel his breathing, and he, of course, could feel hers.  How badly she had treated him! yet, here they were treading one measure.  The enchantment of the dance surprised her.  A clear line of difference divided like a tangible fence her experience within this maze of motion from her experience without it.  Her beginning to dance had been like a change of atmosphere; outside, she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by comparison with the tropical sensations here.  She had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood.  Wildeve by himself would have been merely an agitation; Wildeve added to the dance, and the moonlight, and the secrecy, began to be a delight.  Whether his personality supplied the greater part of this sweetly compounded feeling, or whether the dance and the scene weighed the more therein, was a nice point upon which Eustacia herself was entirely in a cloud.

People began to say “Who are they?” but no invidious inquiries were made.  Had Eustacia mingled with the other girls in their ordinary daily walks the case would have been different:  here she was not inconvenienced by excessive inspection, for all were wrought to their brightest grace by the occasion.  Like the planet Mercury surrounded by the lustre of sunset, her permanent brilliancy passed without much notice in the temporary glory of the situation.

As for Wildeve, his feelings are easy to guess.  Obstacles were a ripening sun to his love, and he was at this moment in a delirium of exquisite misery.  To clasp as his for five minutes what was another man’s through all the rest of the year was a kind of thing he of all men could appreciate.  He had long since begun to sigh again for Eustacia; indeed, it may be asserted that signing the marriage register with Thomasin was the natural signal to his heart to return to its first quarters, and that the extra complication of Eustacia’s marriage was the one addition required to make that return compulsory.

Thus, for different reasons, what was to the rest an exhilarating movement was to these two a riding upon the whirlwind.  The dance had come like an irresistible attack upon whatever sense of social order there was in their minds, to drive them back into old paths which were now doubly irregular.  Through three dances in succession they spun their way; and then, fatigued with the incessant motion, Eustacia turned to quit the circle in which she had already remained too long.  Wildeve led her to a grassy mound a few yards distant, where she sat down, her partner standing beside her.  From the time that he addressed her at the beginning of the dance till now they had not exchanged a word.

“The dance and the walking have tired you?” he said tenderly.

“No; not greatly.”

“It is strange that we should have met here of all places, after missing each other so long.”