“But this is different,” she said to herself.  “They compelled me to unhappiness.  I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen.  It is quite different.”

But she looked anxiously at the girl.  They smiled at each other with their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity.  But their lips smiled guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.

CHAPTER II

The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour.  To the south, beyond a creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain.  It stretched illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did not seem as if it could be a human territory.  It could be regarded only as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky, stood on the far horizon.  They passed a station, built high above the marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain.  A tongue of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.

This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the Pentlands.  That was like tragedy.  Storms broke on the hills, spread snow or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they had exhausted all their violence on certain specific occasions.  But this plain was like a realist mind with an intense consciousness of cause and effect.  There would blow a warning wind before the storm.  It would be visible afar off in its coming, as a darkness, a flaw on the horizon; and when it had scourged the plain it would be seen for long travelling on towards the mainland.  There would be no illusion that anything happens suddenly or that anything disappears.  Here the long preparation of earth’s events and their endurance would be evident.  It would breed people like Marion, in whom a sense of the bearing of the past on the present was so powerful that it was often difficult to know of what she was speaking, and whether the tale she was telling of Richard referred to yesterday or his boyhood; that it was impossible to say whether she smiled because of memory or hope when she leaned forward and said, “This is Kerith Island.”

“Mhm,” said Ellen, since it was not her own country; “it’s verra flat.”  And then, realising that she was belittling beauty, she exclaimed, “I must have said that for the sake of being disagreeable.  I think it’s fine, though very different from Scotland.  But after all, why should everything be like Scotland?  There’s no real reason.  I don’t see where Richard’s going to work, though.”