Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything.  There was one thing he had not spoiled, because he had never suspected its existence—­her singular passion for the place.  Of course, if he had suspected it, he would have stamped on it.  It was his business to stamp on other people’s passions.  Luckily, it wasn’t in him to conceive a passion for a place.

It had come upon her at first sight as they drove between twilight and night from Reyburn through Rathdale into Garthdale.  It was when they had left the wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark, into a sky already whitening above the hidden moon.  And she saw Morfe, gray as iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it.  There was something in their form and in their gesture that called to her as if they knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her with the shock of recognition, as if she had known them and had waited too.

And close beside her own wonder and excitement she had felt the deep and sullen repulsion of her companions.  The Vicar sat huddled in his overcoat.  His nostrils, pinched with repugnance, sniffed as they drank in the cold, clean air.  From time to time he shuddered, and a hoarse muttering came from under the gray woolen scarf he had wound round his mouth and beard.  He was the righteous man, sent into uttermost abominable exile for his daughter’s sin.  Behind him, on the back seat of the trap, Alice and Mary cowed under their capes and rugs.  They had turned their shoulders to each other, hostile in their misery.  Gwenda was sorry for them.

The gray road dipped and turned and plunged them to the bottom of Garthdale.  The small, scattering lights of the village waited for her in the hollow, with something humble and sad and familiar in their setting.  They too stung her with that poignant and secret sense of recognition.

“This is the place,” the Vicar had said.  He had addressed himself to Alice; and it had been as if he had said, This the place, the infernal, the damnable place, you’ve brought us to with your behavior.

Their hatred of it had made Gwenda love it.  “You can have your old Garthdale all to yourself,” Alice had said.  “Nobody else wants it.”

That, to Gwenda, was the charm of it.  The adorable place was her own.  Nobody else wanted it.  She loved it for itself.  It had nothing but itself to offer her.  And that was enough.  It was almost, as she had said, too much.  Her questing youth conceived no more rapturous adventure than to follow the sheep over Karva, to set out at twilight and see the immense night come down on the high moors above Upthorne; to get up when Alice was asleep and slip out and watch the dawn turning from gray to rose, and from rose to gold above Greffington Edge.