stroke and was expecting another every day.  There were the two unmarried daughters of a retired manufacturer on the far side of the Green.  They were plump and had red cheeks, if he had cared for plumpness and red cheeks; but they had no conversation.  The only pretty girl whose prettiness appealed to Rowcliffe had an “adenoid” mouth which he held to be a drawback.  There was the daughter of his predecessor, but she again was well over forty, rigid and melancholy and dry.

All these people became visibly excited when they saw young Rowcliffe starting off in his trap and returning; but young Rowcliffe was never excited, never even interested when he saw them.  There was nothing about them that appealed to his romantic youth.

As for Morfe Manor, and Garth Manor and Greffington Hall, they were nearly always empty, so that he had not very much chance of improving his acquaintance there.

And he had nothing to hope for from the summer visitors, girls with queer clothes and queer manners and queer accents; bouncing, convivial girls who spread themselves four abreast on the high roads; fat, lazy girls who sat about on the Green; blowsed, slouching girls who tramped the dales with knapsacks and no hats.  The hard eyes of young Rowcliffe never softened as he looked at the summer visitors.  Their behavior irritated him.  It reminded him that there were women in the world and that he missed, quite unbearably at moments, the little red-haired nurse who had been so clever and so kind.  Moreover it offended his romantic youth.  The little publicans and shop-keepers of Morfe did not offend it; neither did the peasants and the farmers; they were part of the place; generations of them had been born in those gray houses, built from the gaunt ribs of the hills; whereas the presence of the summer visitors was an outrage to the silent and solitary country that his instincts inscrutably adored.  No wonder that he didn’t care to look at them.

* * * * *

But one night in September, when the moon was high in the south, as he was driving toward Garth on his way to Upthorne, the eyes of young Rowcliffe were startled out of their aversion by the sudden and incredible appearance of a girl.

It was at the bend of the road where Karva lowers its head and sinks back on the moor; and she came swinging up the hill as Rowcliffe’s horse scraped his way slowly down it.  She was in white (he couldn’t have missed her) and she carried herself like a huntress; slender and quick, with high, sharp-pointed breasts.  She looked at him as she passed and her face was wide-eyed and luminous under the moon.  Her lips were parted with her speed, so that, instinctively, his hands tightened on the reins as if he had thought that she was going to speak to him.  But of course she did not speak.

He looked back and saw her swing off the high road and go up Karva.  A flock of mountain sheep started from their couches on the heather and looked at her, and she went driving them before her.  They trailed up Karva slowly, in a long line, gray in the moonlight.  Their mournful, musical voices came to him from the hill.