dence an opportunity of
proving its strength and her folly, she kept her eyelids lowered for a
while. This was another pastime of her childhood: she tried to tempt
God, failed, and laughed at Him instead of at herself.

She stood there, clad in a colour of rich earth, her head bare and
gilded by the sunlight, both hands on the frail basket, and the white
eyelids giving the strange air of experience to her face.

"I'm going to look in a minute," she said, and kept her word. Her dark
eyes illumined her face, searched the world and found nothing new. There
was, indeed, the smallest possible change, but surely it was not one in
which God would trouble to take a hand. She could see John's figure
moving slowly on the Brent Farm road. A woman's form appeared in the
porch and went to meet his: the two stood together in the road.

Miriam made an impatient noise and turned her back on them. She was
irritated by the sight of another woman's power, even though John were
its sole victim, for she knew that the world of men had only to become
aware of her existence and the track to Pinderwell House would be
impassable.

"There's no false modesty about me!" she cried to an astonished sheep,
and threw a tuft of heather at it.

Suddenly she lifted her chin and began to sing on notes too high for
her, and tunelessly, as sign of her defiance, and the words of her song
dealt with the dreariness of the moor and her determination to escape
from it; but in the midst of them she laughed delightedly.

"I'm an idiot! Uncle Alfred's coming. But if he fails me"--she kicked
the basket and ran after it--"I'll do that to him!"

She sang naturally now, in her low, husky voice, as she searched the
banks for violets, but once she broke off to murmur, without humour,
with serious belief, "He can't fail me. Who could? No one but Notya."
Such was her faith in the word's acknowledgement of charm.

She found the violets, but she would not pick them because they stared
at her with a confidence like her own, and with an appealing innocence,
and thinking she might get primroses under Halkett's larches she went on
swiftly, waving the basket as though it were an Indian club.

She stopped when she met the stream which foamed into the stealthy quiet
of the wood, and on a large flat stone she sat and was splashed by the
noisy water. The larch-trees were alive with feathery green, and their
arms waved with the wind, but when Miriam peered through their trunks