wo occasions, from a mixture of
motives, partly passion, partly jealousy, partly _ennui_, awoke one day
to find herself ruined, and a grim future hung before her. She had
realised her doom for the first time in its entirety on the Midsummer
Day preceding that we are now describing. On that day she had walked
over to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her
betrayer the fulfilment of his promise of marriage. He had laughed at
her, and she had fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those
torturing terrors which only a woman _in extremis_ can know. And on her
way back she had seen the ghost or 'bogle' of Deep Crag; the ghost had
spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having
received what she at once recognised as her death sentence.

What had she seen? An effect of moonlit mist--a shepherd boy bent on a
practical joke--a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks?
What had she heard? The evening greeting of a passer-by, wafted down to
her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm
enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain,
those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who
can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend
of the ghost--of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the
tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end
of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor
every Midsummer Night, with her moaning child upon her arm--had flashed
into Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind
her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists. To
see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by
the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive
the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along
with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen
her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom.

A week later she had disappeared from home and from the neighbourhood.
The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken some money with her, and
all trace of her was lost. The father had a period of gloomy
taciturnity, during which his principal relief was got out of jeering
and girding at his elder brother, the noodle's eyes wandered and
glittered more; his shrunken frame seemed more shru