the storm clouds.

And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She had promised
to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised to go with the others on
a picnic the following day, but her conscience was pricking her. Twice
this last fortnight had she been forced to give up a night-school she
held in a little lonely hamlet among the fells, because even _she_ had
been too tired to walk there and back after a day of physical exertion.
Were not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been conscious of
a strange inner restlessness as they all stood waiting in the road for
the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had thought her looking depressed and pale,
and even dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And
then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression,
blown away by the winds,--or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly
presence, a keen responsive eye?

Elsmere, indeed, was gaiety itself. He kept up an incessant war with
Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar's expense,
which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way;
he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form,
and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the
girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted
himself on Whindale.

'How fine all this black purple is!' he cried, as they topped the ridge,
and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by
line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in
the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. 'I had grown quite
tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.'

'Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?' said Catherine, with a little
mocking wonder. 'How wanton, how prodigal!'

'Does it deserve a Nemesis?' he said, laughing. 'Drowning from now till
I depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On
this enchanted soil all things are welcome!'

She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute to
the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his
stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a
little way off laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange
new pulse leapt up in Catherine.

'The wind is very boisterous here,' she said, with a shiver. 'I think we
ought to be going on.'

And she hurried up to the others, nor di