“I reckon your plan will work,” he said to Kit, with a nod of satisfaction.

Kit nodded and picking up his hat and some letters went out.  As he walked down the dale the moon rose above a shadowy fell, touching the opposite hillside with silver light that reached the fields at the bottom farther on.  Tall pikes of wet hay threw dark shadows across a meadow, and he heard the roar of a swollen beck.  There was too much water in the dale, but Kit knew something might be done to make farming pay in spite of the weather.  Land that had gone sour might be recovered by draining, and a bank could be built where the river now and then washed away the crops.  Osborn, however, was poor and extravagant, and his agent’s talents were rather applied to raising rents than improving the soil.

Kit stopped when he got near Allerby, where the dale widens and a cluster of low white houses stands among old trees.  The village glimmered in the moonlight and beyond it rolling country, dotted by dark woods, ran back to the sea.  A beck plunged down the hillside with a muffled roar, and a building, half in light and half in shadow, occupied the hollow of the ghyll.  Kit, leaning on the bridge, watched the glistening thread of water that trickled over the new iron wheel, and noted the raw slate slabs that had been recently built into the mossy wall.  A big traction engine, neatly covered by a tarpaulin, and a trailer lurry stood in front of the sliding door.

Osborn had spent some money here, for Allerby mill, with its seed and chemical manure stores, paid him a higher rent than the best of his small farms.  It was obviously well managed by the tenant, and Kit approved.  Modern machines and methods, although expensive, were good and were needed in the dale.  The trouble was, they sometimes gave the man who could use them power to rob his poorer neighbors.  Kit saw that concentrated power was often dangerous, and since unorganized, individual effort was no longer profitable, he knew no cure but cooperation.

Although young, he was seldom rash.  Enthusiasm is not common in the bleak northern dales, whose inhabitants are, for the most part, conservative and slow.  Wind and rain had hardened him and he had inherited a reserved strength and quietness from ancestors who had braved the storms that raged about Ashness.  Yet the north is not always stern, for now and then the gray sky breaks, and fell and dale shine in dazzling light and melt with mystic beauty into passing shade.  Kit, like his country, varied in his moods; sometimes he forgot to be practical and his caution vanished, leaving him romantic and imaginative.

He went on, and as he reached the first of the white houses a girl came out of a gate and stopped where the moonlight fell across the road.  She had some beauty and her pose was graceful.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, with rather exaggerated surprise, “it’s Kit!  I suppose you’ll take this letter?  I was going to the post.”