The Garstins had always been good church-goers, and Anthony, for years, had acted as churchwarden.  It was one summer evening, up at the vicarage, whilst he was checking the offertory account, that he first set eyes upon her.  She was fresh back from school at Leeds:  she was dressed in a white dress:  she looked, he thought, like a London lady.

She stood by the window, tall and straight and queenly, dreamily gazing out into the summer twilight, whilst he and her uncle sat over their business.  When he rose to go, she glanced at him with quick curiosity; he hurried away, muttering a sheepish good night.

The next time that he saw her was in church on Sunday.  He watched her shyly, with a hesitating, reverential discretion:  her beauty seemed to him wonderful, distant, enigmatic.  In the afternoon, young Mrs. Forsyth, from Longscale, dropped in for a cup of tea with his mother, and the two set off gossiping of Rosa Blencarn, speaking of her freely, in tones of acrimonious contempt.  For a long while he sat silent, puffing at his pipe; but at last, when his mother concluded with, ‘She looks t’ me fair stuck-oop, full o’ toonish airs an’ graces,’ despite himself, he burst out:  ‘Ye’re jest wastin’ yer breath wi’ that cackle.  I reckon Miss Blencarn’s o’ a different clay to us folks.’  Young Mrs. Forsyth tittered immoderately, and the next week it was rumoured about the valley that ‘Tony Garstin was gone luny over t’ parson’s niece.’

But of all this he knew nothing—­keeping to himself, as was his wont, and being, besides, very busy with the hay harvest—­until one day, at dinner-time, Henry Sisson asked if he’d started his courting; Jacob Sowerby cried that Tony’d been too slow in getting to work, for that the girl had been seen spooning in Crosby Shaws with Curbison the auctioneer, and the others (there were half-a-dozen of them lounging round the hay-waggon) burst into a boisterous guffaw.  Anthony flushed dully, looking hesitatingly from the one to the other; then slowly put down his beer-can, and of a sudden, seizing Jacob by the neck, swung him heavily on the grass.  He fell against the waggon-wheel, and when he rose the blood was streaming from an ugly cut in his forehead.  And henceforward Tony Garstin’s courtship was the common jest of all the parish.

As yet, however, he had scarcely spoken to her, though twice he had passed her in the lane that led up to the vicarage.  She had given him a frank, friendly smile; but he had not found the resolution to do more than lift his hat.  He and Henry Sisson stacked the hay in the yard behind the house; there was no further mention made of Rosa Blencarn; but all day long Anthony, as he knelt thatching the rick, brooded over the strange sweetness of her face, and on the fell-top, while he tramped after the ewes over the dry, crackling heather, and as he jogged along the narrow, rickety road, driving his cartload of lambs into the auction mart.

Thus, as the weeks slipped by, he was content with blunt, wistful ruminations upon her indistinct image.  Jacob Sowerby’s accusation, and several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering conception of her difference from the ruck of her sex.