love me, an' I will na tak
ye till ye do. I'll jest go on waitin' for ye, an', mark my words, my
day 'ull coom at last.'

He spoke loudly, in a slow, stubborn voice, and stepped suddenly towards
her. With a faint, frightened cry she shrank back into the doorway of
the hen-house.

'Ye talk like a prophet. Ye sort o' skeer me.'

He laughed grimly, and paused, reflectively scanning her face. He seemed
about to continue in the same strain; but, instead, turned abruptly on
his heel, and strode away through the garden gate.

IV

For three hundred years there had been a Garstin at Hootsey: generation
after generation had tramped the grey stretch of upland, in the
spring-time scattering their flocks over the fell-sides, and, at the
'back-end', on dark, winter afternoons, driving them home again, down
the broad bridle-path that led over the 'raise'. They had been a race of
few words, 'keeping themselves to themselves', as the phrase goes;
beholden to no man, filled with a dogged, churlish pride--an upright,
old-fashioned race, stubborn, long-lived, rude in speech, slow of
resolve.

Anthony had never seen his father, who had died one night, upon the
fell-top, he and his shepherd, engulfed in the great snowstorm of 1849.
Folks had said that he was the only Garstin who had failed to make old
man's bones.

After his death, Jake Atkinson, from Ribblehead in Yorkshire, had come
to live at Hootsey. Jake was a fine farmer, a canny bargainer, and very
handy among the sheep, till he took to drink, and roystering every week
with the town wenches up at Carlisle. He was a corpulent, deep-voiced,
free-handed fellow: when his time came, though he died very hardly, he
remained festive and convivial to the last. And for years afterwards, in
the valley, his memory lingered: men spoke of him regretfully, recalling
his quips, his feats of strength, and his choice breed of Herdwicke
rams. But he left behind him a host of debts up at Carlisle, in Penrith,
and in almost every market town--debts that he had long ago pretended to
have paid with money that belonged to his sister. The widow Garstin sold
the twelve Herdwicke rams, and nine acres of land: within six weeks she
had cleared off every penny, and for thirteen months, on Sundays, wore
her mourning with a mute, forbidding grimness: the bitter thought that,
unbeknown to her, Jake had acted dishonestly in money matters, and that
he had ended his days in riotous sin, soured her pride, imb