The prospect of the inevitable excitement of the adventure, amounting, in Liza’s mind, to a sensation equivalent to sport, prevailed over her dread of the difficulties and dangers of a perilous mountain journey, and she again begged to be permitted to go.

“Are you quite sure you wish it?” said Rotha, not without an underlying reluctance to accept of her companionship.  “It’s a rugged journey.  We must walk under Glaramara.”  She spoke as though she had the right of maturity of years to warn her friend against a hazardous project.

Liza protested that nothing would please her but to go.  She accepted without a twinge the implication of superiority of will and physique which the young daleswoman arrogated.  If social advantages had counted for anything, they must have been all in Liza’s favor; but they were less than nothing in the person of this ruddy girl against the natural strength of the pale-faced young woman, the days of whose years scarcely numbered more than her own.

“We must set off at once,” said Rotha; “but first I must go to Fornside.”

To go round by the tailor’s desolate cottage did not sensibly impede their progress.  Rotha had paid hurried visits daily to her forlorn little home since the terrible night of the death of the master of Shoulthwaite.  She had done what she could to make the cheerless house less cheerless.  She had built a fire on the hearth and spread out her father’s tools on the table before the window at which he worked.  Nothing had tempted him to return.  Each morning she found everything exactly as she had left it the morning before.

When the girls reached the cottage, Liza instinctively dropped back.  Rotha’s susceptible spirit perceived the restraint, and suffered from the sentiment of dread which it implied.

“Stay here, then,” she said, in reply to her companion’s unspoken reluctance to go farther.  In less than a minute Rotha had returned.  Her eyes were wet.

“He is not here,” she said, without other explanation.  “Could we not go up the fell?”

The girls turned towards the Fornside Fell on an errand which both understood and neither needed to explain.

“Do the words of a song ever torment you, Liza, rising up in your mind again and again, and refusing to go away?”

“No—­why?” said Liza, simply.

“Nothing—­only I can’t get a song out of my head today.  It comes back and back—­

     One lonely foot sounds on the keep,
     And that’s the warder’s tread.”

The girls had not gone far when they saw the object of their search leaning over a low wall, and holding his hands to his eyes as though straining his sight to catch a view of some object in the distance.  Simeon Stagg was already acquiring the abandoned look of the man who is outlawed from his fellows.  His hair and beard were growing long, shaggy, and unkempt.  They were beginning to be frosted with gray.  His dress was loose; he wore no belt.  The haggard expression, natural to his thin face, had become more marked.