She glanced out.  It promised to be very dark, and a tremour came over her.  Then she clad herself in haste, drawing from a box a thin shawl of faded pale blue silk with a broad crimson edge, which she drew close about her shoulders.  The band of red lying about her neck forced forward her golden tresses, throwing them about her brow so that they stood out round her face in a changeful aureole of fine-spun gold.  She took a swift glance in the mirror, holding her candle in her hand.  Then she laughed a nervous little laugh all to herself.  How foolish of her!  Of course, it would be impossible for him to see her.  But nevertheless she put out her light, and went to the door smiling.  She had no sense of doing that which she ought not to do; for she had been accustomed to her liberty in all matters whatsoever, ever since she came to Craig Ronald, and in the summer weather nothing was more common than for her to walk out upon the moor in the dewy close of day.  She shut the door quietly behind her, and set her foot on the silent elastic turf, close cropped by many woolly generations.  The night shut down behind her closer than the door.  The western wind cooled her brain, and the singing in her heart rose into a louder altar-song.  A woman ever longs to be giving herself.  She rejoices in sacrifice.  It is a pity that she so often chooses an indifferently worthy altar.  Yet it is questionable whether her own pleasure in the sacrifice is any the less.

At the gate of the yard, which had been left open and hung backward perilously upon its hinges, she paused.

“That is that careless girl, Jess!” she said, practical even at such a moment.

And she was right—­it was Jess who had so left it.  Indeed, had she been a moment sooner, she might have seen Jess flit by, taking the downward road which led through the elder—­trees to the waterside.  As it was, she only shut the gate carefully, so that no night-wandering cattle might disturb the repose of her grandparents, laid carefully asleep by Meg in their low-ceilinged bedroom.

The whole farm breathed from its walls and broad yard spaces the peaceful rise and fall of an infant’s repose.  There was no sound about the warm and friendly place save the sleepy chunner of a hen on the bauks of the peat-house, just sufficiently awake to be conscious of her own comfort.

The hill road was both stony and difficult, but Winsome’s light feet went along it easily and lightly.  On not a single stone did she stumble.  She walked so gladsomely that she trod on the air.  There were no rocks in her path that night.  Behind her the light in the west winked once and went out.  Palpable darkness settled about her.  The sigh of the waste moorlands, where in the haggs the wild fowl were nestling and the adders slept, came down over the well-pastured braes to her.