They climbed the hill and went along a path that followed the skyline of the ridge, over which the sea-borne wind slid like water over a sluice.  To be here should have brought such a stinging happiness as bathing.  It should have been wonderful to walk in such comradeship with the clouds, and to mark that those which rode above the estuary seemed on no higher level than this path, while beneath stretched the farm-flecked green pavement of Kerith Island, and ahead, where the ridge mounted to a crouching summit, stood the four grey towers of the Castle.  But the quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick dragging on the ground.  She was whistling through her teeth like an angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.

They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes, rusted and prohibitive and futile.

“Look at them!  Look at them!” exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of fury.  “The Hallelujah Army put them up.  It’s like them.  Some idea of raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence to see the Castle.  It was a fool’s idea.  They know nothing.  The East End trippers that come here can’t climb.  They’re too dog-tired.  They go straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces.  Those that push as far as Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the day.”  She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the enclosed land.  “The waste of good iron!  You’re not a farmer’s daughter, Ellen; you don’t know how precious stuff like this is.  And look at the thistle and the couch-grass.  This used to be a good sheep-feed.  The land going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings and such-like.  In ten years it’ll be a scare-crow of a countryside.  I wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead leaves in autumn.”  Fatigue fell upon her.  She seemed exhausted by the manufacture of so much malice.  With an abrupt and listless gesture she pointed her stick at the Castle.  “It isn’t much, you see,” she said apologetically.  And indeed there was little enough.  There were just the two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had not had features given them by ruin.  “I’m afraid it’s not a fair exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen.  But there’s a good view up there between the two upper towers.  Where the fools have put a flagstaff.  I won’t come.  I’m tired....”