For three hundred years there had been a Garstin at Hootsey:  generation after generation had tramped the grey stretch of upland, in the spring-time scattering their flocks over the fell-sides, and, at the ‘back-end’, on dark, winter afternoons, driving them home again, down the broad bridle-path that led over the ‘raise’.  They had been a race of few words, ‘keeping themselves to themselves’, as the phrase goes; beholden to no man, filled with a dogged, churlish pride—­an upright, old-fashioned race, stubborn, long-lived, rude in speech, slow of resolve.

Anthony had never seen his father, who had died one night, upon the fell-top, he and his shepherd, engulfed in the great snowstorm of 1849.  Folks had said that he was the only Garstin who had failed to make old man’s bones.

After his death, Jake Atkinson, from Ribblehead in Yorkshire, had come to live at Hootsey.  Jake was a fine farmer, a canny bargainer, and very handy among the sheep, till he took to drink, and roystering every week with the town wenches up at Carlisle.  He was a corpulent, deep-voiced, free-handed fellow:  when his time came, though he died very hardly, he remained festive and convivial to the last.  And for years afterwards, in the valley, his memory lingered:  men spoke of him regretfully, recalling his quips, his feats of strength, and his choice breed of Herdwicke rams.  But he left behind him a host of debts up at Carlisle, in Penrith, and in almost every market town—­debts that he had long ago pretended to have paid with money that belonged to his sister.  The widow Garstin sold the twelve Herdwicke rams, and nine acres of land:  within six weeks she had cleared off every penny, and for thirteen months, on Sundays, wore her mourning with a mute, forbidding grimness:  the bitter thought that, unbeknown to her, Jake had acted dishonestly in money matters, and that he had ended his days in riotous sin, soured her pride, imbued her with a rancorous hostility against all the world.  For she was a very proud woman, independent, holding her head high, so folks said, like a Garstin bred and born; and Anthony, although some reckoned him quiet and of little account, came to take after her as he grew into manhood.

She took into her own hands the management of the Hootsey farm, and set the boy to work for her along with the two farm servants.  It was twenty-five years now since his uncle Jake’s death:  there were grey hairs in his sandy beard; but he still worked for his mother, as he had done when a growing lad.

And now that times were grown to be bad (of late years the price of stock had been steadily falling; and the hay harvests had drifted from bad to worse) the widow Garstin no longer kept any labouring men; but lived, she and her son, year in and year out, in a close parsimonious way.

That had been Anthony Garstin’s life—­a dull, eventless sort of business, the sluggish incrustation of monotonous years.  And until Rosa Blencarn had come to keep house for her uncle, he had never thought twice on a woman’s face.