lness, she thought.

Suddenly there came a change. A south-wester drove thick rain-clouds
scudding across peak and valley, and filled the passes with dank, white
mists from the Irish Sea, and so, towards the close of a threatening
day, Mrs. Savine's party came winding down in a hurry from a bare hill
shoulder and under the gray crags of Crosbie Fell. The hollows beneath
them were lost in a woolly vapor, low-flying scud raked the bare ridges
above, and even as they passed a black rift in the hillside the first
heavy drops of rain fell pattering. Helen Savine had seen many a
mining adit in British Columbia, and, turning to glance at the mouth of
the tunnel, she read, scratched on the rock beside it, "Thurston's
Folly." That careless glance over her shoulder was to lead to
important results.

"There's wild weather brewing," said Thomas Savine. "Make those ponies
rustle, and we'll get in somewhere before it comes along."

When they reached the little wind-swept village, it became evident that
no shelter for the night could be found there, for it was seldom that
even an enterprising pedestrian tourist came down from the high moors
behind Crosbie Fell. Still, one inhabitant informed their guide, in a
tongue none of the others could comprehend, that if he was in an
unusually good humor old Musker, the keeper, might take them in at
Crosbie Ghyll. Thus it happened that just as the rain began in
earnest, such a cavalcade as had probably never before passed its
gloomy portals rode up to the gate of the dilapidated edifice. Some of
the iron-bound barriers still lay moldering in the hollow of the arch,
and Helen noticed slits for muskets in the stout walls above, for the
owners had been a fighting race, and several times in bygone centuries
the tide of battle had rolled about and then had ebbed away from the
stubbornly-held stronghold. The observer had gathered so much from a
paragraph in her guide-book.

The romance of English history appealed to Helen as it does to the
citizens of the wider Britain over seas, and she turned in her saddle
to look about her. Framed by the weather-worn archway she could see
the black rampart of the fells fading into the rain, and the bare sweep
of moss and moor, which had once stretched unbroken to the feet of the
great ranges above the Solway shore. Inside the quadrangle, for the
place had during the past century served as farm instead of hall, barn,
cart-shed and shippon were ruinous