Blucher, with its handful of desolate gray hovels round it, the heart of the man sank at the gloomy surroundings into the midst of which he had flung himself.  But the zeal of the churchman was as good a tonic for him as the best common sense, and he waited until to-morrow and broad daylight before he allowed himself to even acknowledge an impression.  The warm fireside at the Blucher cheered him too, and his supper of eggs and bacon and fresh crisp havre-bread satisfied such of his physical cravings as, unsatisfied, make a man’s spiritual perceptions very gaunt.

He went to bed, slept, and the next day woke up to a glory of sun and sky, a brilliancy of coloring, a photographic sharpness and clearness of form, a suggestion of beauty beyond that which was seen, which transformed the place as if an angel had passed through it in the night.  As he tramped about the sordid hamlet he forgot the rude uncouthness of men and place for a kind of ecstasy at the loveliness about him.  Every jutting rock of granite shone in the sun like polished jasper, and the numberless little rills trickling down the fell-sides were as threads of silver, now concealed in the gold of the gorse, and now whitening the purple of the heather.  The air was full of blithesome sounds.  Overhead the sky-larks sang in jocund rivalry, mounting higher and higher as if they would have beaten their wings against the sun:  the bees made the heather and the thyme musical as they flew from flower to flower, and the tinkling of the running rills was like the symphony to a changeful theme.  It was in real truth a transformation, and the new-comer into the fitful, seductive, disappointing North felt all its beauty, all its meaning, and gave himself up to his delight as if such a day as yesterday had never been.

After he had done what he wished to do in the village, he went up the fell-side road to Windy Brow, and, obeying his instructions, asked when he got there “if Miss Leonora Darley was at home.”

“Na, she bain’t,” said Jenny, eying poor innocent Alick as a colley might eye a wolf sniffing about the fold.  “T’ auld mistress is.”

“Say Mr. Corfield, please,” said Alick; and Jenny, telling him to “gang intilt parlor,” scuffled off to Keziah, pottering over some pickled red cabbage, which made the house smell like a vinegar-cask.

“I’ve heard tell of you,” said Miss Gryce as she came in wiping her hands on a serviceable and by no means luxurious cloth:  “Emmanuel wrote me a letter about you.  You’re kindly welcome to Monk Grange, but you’re only a haverel to look at.  Take a seat, and tell me—­how’s Emmanuel, my brother?”

“He was well when I saw him the day before yesterday:  at least he said nothing to the contrary,” answered Alick with his conscientious literalness.

“I like that,” said Keziah, also eying him, but as a colley might have eyed a strange sheep, not a wolf.  “A random rory would have made no difference between now and two days back, and believing and being.  You cannot be over-particular in the truth, I take it.”