Her moment of desperate complaint had not moved him at all, nor did he perceive that her joy at the beauty of the place was more intense than anything a happy person would have felt, that her loud laughter bore as bitter a history of wretchedness as a starving man’s grunt over a crust.  He was not convinced that these sudden darkenings of her eyes and voice, and her flights from these moments into the first opportunity of gaiety, represented any real contest with pain.  Life must be lovely and amusing for such a lovely and amusing person.  These were but youth’s moody fandangoes.  He could look on them as calmly as on the soaring and swooping of a white sea-bird.  So he stood on the bridge, leaving her soul to its own devices while he appreciated the view.  Surely this country was not real, but an imagination of Ellen’s mind.  It was so like her.  It was beautiful and solitary even as she was.  The loch that stretched north-east from the narrow neck of water under the bridge was fretted to a majesty of rage by the winds that blew from the black hills around it; but it ended in a dam that was pierced in the middle with some metallic spider’s web of engineering; even so would romantic and utilitarian Ellen have designed a loch.  And the firs which formed a glade of gloom by the waterside, which by their soughing uttered the very song of melancholy’s soul, were cut by the twirling wind into shapes like quips; that too was like Ellen.  And this magnificent avenue that began on the other side of the bridge, and solemnly ascended the hillside as if to a towered palace that certainly was not there, was not unfit walking for the princess that had no king for father.

But as the wonder of the place became familiar, that fever of discomfort which had been vexing Ellen all that day returned.  There was, she felt, some remedy for it quite close at hand; but she did not know what it could be.  If she leapt from a height she might lift this curious burden from her heart.  She scrambled up on the stone parapet of the bridge and jumped back to earth; and he, because it was the kind of thing a boy might have done, took no notice.  But she shivered because this tangible lump of misery was still within her.  She must run about, or the beating of her heart would become an agony.  “Rachael and I found a water-rat under the bridge,” she cried; “preening its whiskers it was, quite the thing, till it saw us and ran off in a terrible fuff.  Let’s go and see if there’s one now.”  She turned round, stared for a minute at the south-west, where ill weather discoloured the hills like a bruise, and said reproachfully, “Surely the rain will never come to spoil to-day.”  To-day was to be such a lovely holiday.  And then she ran round the stone spur of the bridge and crouched down beside the arch on the damp turf.