On the gallows tree?"

There was no smile upon her face, but her eyes were wistful. She was hoping that Joel Hart would soon find a golden ball and come to set her free, before Greystones, and the tyrannical old woman there, had robbed her life of its youth and sweetness. She was just twenty, and panting to spread her wings and fly away. She turned round to look at her home.

It was the most solitary of habitations. About it hung an atmosphere of old forgotten things. It had a tragic air as though its past, by some strange process, were still in being. Even on a golden afternoon such as this, it could not exorcise the grey spirit that haunted it—the spirit of the ancient grey stones of which it was built. The slates were green with moss: the drip-stone was feathered with weeds which, before long, would belt it with a flowery garland: soon the great sycamores would burst into leaf; but even then the house would keep its gloom. It was a fitting habitation for Mistress Annas Lynn, who was nearly a hundred years old.

Lucy turned her eyes away from it, and looked at the mountain at the head of the dale, down whose sides the streams slid in thin white lines to fall with many a rainbow cascade into Swirtle Tarn, lying at its feet, blue as a violet. Thundergay dominated the dale. Its jagged peaks soared high above the fells around. It was the birth-place of eagles, mists and storms; and it was also the nurse of her sister Barbara.

Her mind turned to Barbara.

If Lucy ever visualised such abstract ideas as goodness, integrity, and justice, she saw them under the living form of her sister. Joel Hart she loved; Barbara she worshipped. With Joel she stood on an equality—he was as humanly imperfect as she—but Barbara stood on a mountain height, a great, grand figure, with a great, grand heart, sublime in her magnanimity, immovable as granite among the storms of her world.

She felt, too, that it was among the mountains that Barbara found her secret inspiration and strength. Since childhood she had spent the greater part of her life upon Thundergay, and, though it had been a rough nurse, beating her with winds like scorpions, training her by hunger and cold and weariness, yet she loved it still, but it had made her silent.

Lucy did not put her thought into these words, but she felt them, nevertheless.

She now left the cattle road, and followed a sheep-track round Swirtle Tarn. A shoulder of Thundergay seemed to block her way, but the track wound in and out of knowes and hollows, and led her at last through a gap, where she looked down upon a scene of pastoral beauty. A lawn of velvet grass lay by the margin of the tarn, dotted with sheep and a few lambs—the firstlings of the flock. It sloped gently upwards, and surged like a full green tide against the bases of the cliffs. Here was a cave, called for generations Ketel's Parlour, in memory of some Northern robber who had made it his eyrie. Now Barbara claimed it, and often slept there when her work kept her abroad at night. The flocks were her especial care, and she "shepherded and improved the same according to the due course of good shepherding," as the old title-deeds of Greystones recommended.

Lucy looked in. By the threshold her sister lay fast asleep, her long limbs sunk in repose upon a bed of straw. Her head was near the entrance, and the sun, as it got lower, flowed in golden ripples across the threshold. When it touched her eyes she would awake, for the sun was her clock by day, as the Great Bear was her clock by night.

Lucy did not speak, but took her knitting from her pocket, and sat down on a rock to wait.

The cave had been partly built up long, long ago, and two narrow slits of windows made in the artificial wall. The rusty remains of iron bolts and hinges showed that a door had once closed the entrance. A huge slab of slate lay across the threshold, and underneath it a little spring that babbled out of the floor of the cave disappeared, appearing again some few yards further down the slope.

It was not long before Barbara awoke. The sun was sinking; the tarn lay in shadow, blue as steel and glassy as a mirror; now and then a heron struck an evanescent star from the shallows where it splashed. But the fellside still stood full in the vivid light, and was dyed to a rich green, like the colour seen on old silken needlework. Upon Barbara, standing at the mouth of the cave, the sunshine seemed to concentrate. She looked larger and grander and more remote than a simple human being. She might be an incarnation of some Nature-power, older than the mountains around her, unassailed by time, and partaking of the perpetual youth of immortals.

"One of the ewes has died," she said to Lucy, "and I've spent hours trying to get its lamb fostered. Like enough thee'll have to take it home, and bring it up by hand."

"Botherment!" exclaimed her sister; "haven't I plenty to do already?"

Barbara made no reply. She was wondering what it felt like to be dead, wondering what that strange thing was which came but once, but came to all living, to men and women and sheep, and, in the twinkling of an eye, sent them out of the Known into the Unknown, where all mysteries might abound.

"Hast ever thought, Lucy," she said at last, "how strange it is that we should die like sheep and sheep like us?"

"Not I!" replied the younger girl. "My head's stuffed with lighter rubbish," and she shuddered as her eyes fell upon a huddled white heap under a thorn.

"It mazes me," continued Barbara, "when I think that yon poor creature I've thought so silly mappen knows more than I do now. Death must be a queer waking, Lucy. It's likely we'll find that we're very different to what we fancied we were. It's likely we're not the only things with souls. It's likely that the world wasn't just made for us, and all the creatures for our use. Old Camomile says that every blade of grass has its own little green soul, and loves the wind and the sunshine and the rain, and has its ideas about the sky and the stars. Mappen it puts us down as girt senseless creatures, too coarse-minded to understand its thoughts."

"Old Camomile is getting old," said Lucy. "He havers a lot."

Barbara was silent. She rarely spoke because she rarely found anyone to understand her, save the old man Timothy Hadwin, called by the villagers Old Camomile, because he made potions, and electuaries, and essences, curing their aches and pains as if by magic.

Lucy rolled up her wool, put the ball in her pocket, and looked slowly round.

"It's a lonely-like place to spend the night," she said. "I wonder you're not afraid."

"Sometimes I am," replied Barbara. She recalled nights when she had trembled before the vastness of the hills, when the winds had deafened her with stories of things she could not comprehend, when she had turned from gazing at the cold light of the stars with a fear at her heart, because they would answer nothing to all her questions.

Barbara was not educated as the world counts education. It is true that she knew the fells and dales, the tarns and meres of her native country, as well as the oldest shepherd, who had spent his long life among them. She could tell the names of the constellations, and take her direction upon the darkling moors from them. She knew when to plough and sow and reap. No one was so weather-wise as she in the village. But this is not education in the eyes of the world, and Barbara set little value upon her knowledge. She could not speak the King's English, though she spoke something much more picturesque and vigorous; she only read the simplest books; and wrote an ungainly, but characteristic hand. She knew no history, but her mind was furnished with a collection of tales and legends, which held more of the inner truth of history than the bare facts. Yet she longed with all her ardent nature for the learning contained in books; for the power to grasp the thoughts that flashed across her mind and left upon it an impression as of a great