with knapsacks and no hats. The hard eyes of young Rowcliffe never softened as he looked at the summer visitors. Their behavior irritated him. It reminded him that there were women in the world and that he missed, quite unbearably at moments, the little red-haired nurse who had been so clever and so kind. Moreover it offended his romantic youth. The little publicans and shop-keepers of Morfe did not offend it; neither did the peasants and the farmers; they were part of the place; generations of them had been born in those gray houses, built from the gaunt ribs of the hills; whereas the presence of the summer visitors was an outrage to the silent and solitary country that his instincts inscrutably adored. No wonder that he didn't care to look at them.

* * * * *

But one night in September, when the moon was high in the south, as he was driving toward Garth on his way to Upthorne, the eyes of young Rowcliffe were startled out of their aversion by the sudden and incredible appearance of a girl.

It was at the bend of the road where Karva lowers its head and sinks back on the moor; and she came swinging up the hill as Rowcliffe's horse scraped his way slowly down it. She was in white (he couldn't have missed her) and she carried herself like a huntress; slender and quick, with high, sharp-pointed breasts. She looked at him as she passed and her face was wide-eyed and luminous under the moon. Her lips were parted with her speed, so that, instinctively, his hands tightened on the reins as if he had thought that she was going to speak to him. But of course she did not speak.

He looked back and saw her swing off the high road and go up Karva. A flock of mountain sheep started from their couches on the heather and looked at her, and she went driving them before her. They trailed up Karva slowly, in a long line, gray in the moonlight. Their mournful, musical voices came to him from the hill.

He saw her again late—incredibly late—that night as the moon swept from the south toward Karva. She was a long way off, coming down from her hill, a white speck on the gray moor. He pulled up his horse and waited below the point where the track she followed struck the high road; he even got out of his trap and examined, deliberately, his horse's hoofs in turn, spinning out the time. When he heard her he drew himself upright and looked straight at her as she passed him. She flashed by like a huntress, like Artemis carrying the young moon on her forehead. From the turn of her head and the even falling of her feet he felt her unconscious of his existence. And her unconsciousness was hateful to him. It wiped him clean out of the universe of noticeable things.

The apparition fairly cried to his romantic youth. And he said to himself. "Who is the strange girl who walks on the moor by herself at night and isn't afraid?"

* * * * *

He saw her three times after that; once in the broad daylight, on the high road near Morfe, when she passed him with a still more perfect and inimical unconsciousness; once in the distance on the moor, when he caught her, short-skirted and wild, jumping the wide water courses as they came, evidently under the impression that she was unobserved. And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun."

The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs, half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm getting on. She's aware of me all right."

She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from Upthorne. He had sat up all night with John Greatorex who had died at dawn.

The smell of the sick man, and of the bed and of the low close room was still in his nostrils, and in his ears the sounds of dying and of mourning, and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew. And in his eyes the unknown girl and her behavior became suddenly adorable. She was the darting joy and the poignant sweetness, and the sheer extravagant ardor and energy of life. His tempestuously romantic youth rose up and was troubled at the sight of her. And his eyes, that had stared at her in wonder and amusement and inquisitive interest, followed her now with that queer pathos that they had. It was the look that he relied on to move desire in women's eyes; and now it traveled, forlorn and ineffectual, abject almost in its futility, over the gray moorgrass where she went.

* * * * *

That was on Wednesday the fourteenth. On Friday the sixteenth he saw her again at nightfall, in the doorway of John Greatorex's house.

He had overtaken the cart that was carrying John Greatorex's coffin to Upthorne. Low lighted, the long gray house brooded over the marshes, waiting to be disencumbered of its dead.

In the east the broken shoulders of the hills receded, winding with the dale like a coast line of gray cliffs above the mist that was their sea. Tortured, mutilated by the jagged cloud that held her, the moon struggled and tore her way, she lifted and freed herself high and struck the marshes white. Defaced and sinister, above her battlements, she looked at the house and made it terrible, moon-haunted. Its door, low lighted, stood open to the night.

Rowcliffe drew back from the threshold to let a woman pass out. Looking up, he was aware that he had seen her again. He supposed it was the light of that detestable moon that gave her face its queer morbid whiteness.

She went by without seeing him, clenching her hands and carrying her young head high; and he saw that her eyes still held the tears that she was afraid to spill.

Mrs. Gale stood behind her with a lamp, lighting her passage.

"Who is that young lady?" he asked.

"T' Vicar's laass, Gwanda."

The woman leaned to him and whispered, "She's seen t' body."

And in the girl's fear and blindness and defiance he saw the pride of her youth beaten and offended by that which it had seen.

Out there, in the bridle path leading from the high road to the farm, the cart had stopped. The men were lifting the coffin out, shouldering it, carrying it along. He saw Gwenda Cartaret swerve out of their way. Presently he heard her running down the road.

Then he remembered what he had been sent for.

He turned his attention to Mrs. Gale. She was a square-set, blunt-featured woman of forty-five or so, who had once been comely like her daughter Essy. Now her soft chin had sagged; in her cheeks the stagnant blood crawled through a network of little veins, and the gloss had gone from her dark hair. Her brown eyes showed a dull defiance and deprecation of the human destiny.

"Where is he?" he said.

"Oop there, in t' room wi' 's feyther."

"Been drinking again, or what?"

"Naw, Dr. Rawcliffe, 'e 'assn't. I suddn' a sent for yo all this road for nowt."

She drew him into the house place, and whispered.

"I'm feared 'e'll goa queer in 'is 'head, like. 'E's sot there by t' body sence yesterda noon. 'E's not takken off 'is breeches for tree daas. 'E caaun't sleap; 'e wunna eat and 'e wunna drink. There's work to be doon and 'e wunna lay haand to it. Wull yo goa oop t' 'im, Dr. Rawcliffe?"

Rowcliffe went up.