eached the hamlet of High Close, and the house where
Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and the poor bedridden Jim
still lived. They mounted the path behind it, and plunged into the hazel
plantation which had sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable
night. But when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a
scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of High
Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it seemed to Rose
that when she had once let him help her over a rock her hand was never
her own again. He kept it an almost constant prisoner on one pretext or
another till they were at the top.

Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside her, lifting
his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below had been warm and
relaxing. Here it played upon them both with a delicious life-giving
freshness. He looked round on the great hollow bosom of the fell, the
crags buttressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the
valley, the white sparkle of the river.

'It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and frugal
beauty--the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no peaks, no fiords!'

'No!' said Rose scornfully, 'we are not Norway, and we are not
Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at once inform you that we
have no glaciers, and that there is perhaps only one place in the
district where a man who was not an idiot could succeed in killing
himself.'

He looked at her, calmly smiling.

'You are angry,' he said, 'because I make comparisons. You are wholly on
a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in the world that pleased me half as
much as this bare valley, that gray roof'--and he pointed to Burwood
among its trees--'and this knoll of rocky ground.'

His look travelled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. He threw
himself down on the short grass beside her.

'It rained this morning,' she still had the spirit to murmur under her
breath.

He took not the smallest heed.

'Do you know,' he said--and his voice dropped--'can you guess at all why
I am here to-day?'

'You had never seen the Lakes,' she repeated in a prim voice, her eyes
still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitching. 'You stopped at
Whinborough, intending to take the pass over to Ullswater, thence to
make your way to Ambleside and Keswick--or was it to Keswick and
Ambleside?'

She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met abashed her
again.

'_T