ich she was walking, all
served to heighten the nervous depression which had taken hold of her.
As she neared the bridge, however, leading to the little hamlet, beyond
which northwards all was stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in
front of her the gray stone house, backed by the sombre red of a great
copper beech, and overhung by crags, she had perforce to take herself by
both hands, try and realise her mission afresh, and the scene which lay
before her.

CHAPTER X

Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting with
regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this evening nearing
a terrible and long-expected crisis, was the victim of a fate sordid and
common enough, yet not without its elements of dark poetry. Some fifteen
months before this Midsummer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely
old house in which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in
which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so deep that no
doctor could reach them, her mother had passed away. She had been then
strong and well favoured, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed
beauty, and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such
as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch. At the bottom of
all the outward _sauvagerie_, however, there was a heart, and strong
wants, which only affection and companionship could satisfy and tame.
Neither was to be found in sufficient measure within her home. Her
father and she were on fairly good terms, and had for each other up to a
certain point the natural instincts of kinship. On her uncle, whom she
regarded as half-witted, she bestowed alternate tolerance and jeers. She
was, indeed, the only person whose remonstrances ever got under the wool
with old Jim, and her sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing effect on his
curious nonchalance which nothing else had. For the rest, they had no
neighbours with whom the girl could fraternise, and Whinborough was too
far off to provide any adequate food for her vague hunger after emotion
and excitement.

In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse
attractions of a young farmer in the neighbouring valley of Shanmoor. He
was a brute with a handsome face, and a nature in which whatever grains
of heart and conscience might have been interfused with the original
composition had been long since swamped. Mary, who had recklessly flung
herself into his power on one or t