her mother's illness and depression,
had made the Hoze always a mournful home, and naturally this had
affected her, making her a serious, contemplative girl, older than her
years, and one who found her pleasure in sitting on a fallen trunk in
the sheltering woods, listening to the roar of the wind in the pine
boughs, watching the birds and squirrels, and having for companion her
dog Grip, who, when she took him for her walks, generally ran mad for
the first hour, scampering round and round her, making charges at her
feet, and pretending to worry her shoes or dress; running off to hide
and dash out upon her in a mock savage way; bounding into furze bushes,
chasing the rabbits into their holes; and then, as if apologising for
this wild getting rid of a superabundance of animal spirits kept low in
the mournful old house, he would come as soon as she sat quietly down,
crouch close up to her, and lay his head on her knee, to gaze up in her
face, blinking his eyes, and not moving again perhaps for an hour.

Celia seldom went seaward. The distance was short, but she was content
to watch the beautiful changes on the far-spreading waste from high up
on the hills. There had been wrecks on the Freestone Shore, which made
her shudder as she recalled how the wild cries of the hapless mariners
in their appeals for help had reached the shore; she had seen the huge
waves come tumbling in, to send columns of spray high in the air, to be
borne over the land in a salt rain, and, as a rule, the sea repelled
her, and she shrank, too, from the great folds of the cliff, with their
mysterious-looking grass-grown ledges and cracks, up which came the
whispering and gurgling of water, and at times fierce hissings as if sea
monsters lived below, and were threatening those who looked down and did
not pause to think that these sounds must be caused by air compressed by
the inrushing tide.

Then, too, there was something oppressing in the poorly protected shafts
with their sloping descents, once, perhaps hundreds of years back, the
busy spots where old hewers of stone worked their way down below the
thinner and poorer strata to where the freestone was clean and solid.

These spots attracted and yet repelled her, as she peered cautiously
down, to see that they were half hidden by long strands of bramble, with
tufts of pink-headed hemp agrimony, and lower down the sides and archway
infringed with the loveliest of ferns.

There was something very m