, being
half away from earth herself, she had seen him and known he was waiting,
and that he would not leave for any far place without her. She was so
still that the big doctors thought more than once she had passed. But I
knew better."

It was long before I was old enough to be told anything like this that I
began to feel that the moor was in secret my companion and friend, that
it was not only the moot to me, but something else. It was like a thing
alive--a huge giant lying spread out in the sun warming itself, or
covering itself with thick, white mist which sometimes writhed and
twisted itself into wraiths. First I noticed and liked it some day,
perhaps, when it was purple and yellow with gorse and heather and broom,
and the honey scents drew bees and butterflies and birds. But soon I saw
and was drawn by another thing.

How young was I that afternoon when I sat in the deep window and watched
the low, soft whiteness creeping out and hovering over the heather as
if the moor had breathed it? I do not remember. It was such a low little
mist at first; and it crept and crept until its creeping grew into
something heavier and whiter, and it began to hide the heather and
the gorse and broom, and then the low young fir-trees. It mounted and
mounted, and sometimes a breath of wind twisted it into weird shapes,
almost like human creatures. It opened and closed again, and then it
dragged and crept and grew thicker. And as I pressed my face against the
window-pane, it mounted still higher and got hold of the moor and hid
it, hanging heavy and white and waiting. That was what came into my
child mind: that it had done what the moor had told it to do; had hidden
things which wanted to be hidden, and then it waited.

Strangers say that Muircarrie moor is the most beautiful and the most
desolate place in the world, but it never seemed desolate to me. From my
first memory of it I had a vague, half-comforted feeling that there
was some strange life on it one could not exactly see, but was always
conscious of. I know now why I felt this, but I did not know then.

If I had been older when I first began to see what I did see there, I
should no doubt have read things in books which would have given rise
in my mind to doubts and wonders; but I was only a little child who had
lived a life quite apart from the rest of the world. I was too silent by
nature to talk and ask questions, even if I had had others to talk to. I
had only Jean and