measure. There it lay, a weather-beaten
sunburnt village of the hills, abandoned of men, left apart by railway,
trolley, telegraph, and all the forces that link life to life in modern
communities. It had no shops, no theatres, no lectures, no "business
block"; only a church that was opened every other Sunday if the state
of the roads permitted, and a library for which no new books had been
bought for twenty years, and where the old ones mouldered undisturbed on
the damp shelves. Yet Charity Royall had always been told that she ought
to consider it a privilege that her lot had been cast in North Dormer.
She knew that, compared to the place she had come from, North Dormer
represented all the blessings of the most refined civilization. Everyone
in the village had told her so ever since she had been brought there as
a child. Even old Miss Hatchard had said to her, on a terrible occasion
in her life: "My child, you must never cease to remember that it was Mr.
Royall who brought you down from the Mountain."

She had been "brought down from the Mountain"; from the scarred cliff
that lifted its sullen wall above the lesser slopes of Eagle Range,
making a perpetual background of gloom to the lonely valley. The
Mountain was a good fifteen miles away, but it rose so abruptly from the
lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow over North Dormer.
And it was like a great magnet drawing the clouds and scattering them
in storm across the valley. If ever, in the purest summer sky, there
trailed a thread of vapour over North Dormer, it drifted to the Mountain
as a ship drifts to a whirlpool, and was caught among the rocks, torn up
and multiplied, to sweep back over the village in rain and darkness.

Charity was not very clear about the Mountain; but she knew it was a bad
place, and a shame to have come from, and that, whatever befell her
in North Dormer, she ought, as Miss Hatchard had once reminded her, to
remember that she had been brought down from there, and hold her tongue
and be thankful. She looked up at the Mountain, thinking of these
things, and tried as usual to be thankful. But the sight of the young
man turning in at Miss Hatchard's gate had brought back the vision of
the glittering streets of Nettleton, and she felt ashamed of her old
sun-hat, and sick of North Dormer, and jealously aware of Annabel Balch
of Springfield, opening her blue eyes somewhere far off on glories
greater than the glories of Nettleton.

"