position.'

Carinthia's heart stopped beating. Who was this person suddenly conjured
up?

She fancied she might not have heard correctly; she feared to ask and
yet she perceived a novel softness in him that would have answered. Pain
of an unknown kind made her love of her brother conscious that if she
asked she would suffer greater pain.

The house was in sight, a long white building with blinds down at some
of the windows, and some wide open, some showing unclean glass: the
three aspects and signs of a house's emptiness when they are seen
together.

Carinthia remarked on their having met nobody. It had a serious meaning
for them. Formerly they were proud of outstripping the busy population
of the mine, coming down on them with wild wavings and shouts of
sunrise. They felt the death again, a whole field laid low by one
stroke, and wintriness in the season of glad life. A wind had blown and
all had vanished.

The second green of the year shot lively sparkles off the meadows,
from a fringe of coloured glovelets to a warm silver lake of dews. The
firwood was already breathing rich and sweet in the sun. The half-moon
fell rayless and paler than the fan of fleeces pushed up Westward, high
overhead, themselves dispersing on the blue in downy feathers, like
the mottled grey of an eagle's breast: the smaller of them bluish like
traces of the beaked wood-pigeon.

She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of
naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that
rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.

CHAPTER V. A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE

Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth
steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast,
which was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with
the exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl
had stuffed into Chillon's leather sack--the fruit of secret begging on
their behalf about the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky
as he slung it over his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such
a trifle till he had it inside him. 'And you that love tea so, my pretty
one, so that you always laughed and sang after drinking a cup with your
mother,' she said to Carinthia, 'you will find one pinch of it in your
bag at the end of the left-foot slipper, to remember your home by when
you are out in the world.'