miss by recollecting that certainly she had
served her little sister's welfare by crossing her will. Oh, there was
much to be said for Alphonsine. But all the same, it was a pity that the
old people had interfered. She had loved Richard so much that it would
not have mattered to her or to him that he was fatherless, since from
the inexhaustible treasure of her passion for him she could give him far
more than other children receive from both parents. They might have been
so happy together if the old people had not made her marry Peacey.

"But this is different," she said to herself. "They compelled me to
unhappiness. I am forcing happiness on Richard and Ellen. It is quite
different."

But she looked anxiously at the girl. They smiled at each other with
their eyes, as if they were friends in eternity. But their lips smiled
guardedly, for it might be that they were enemies in time.

CHAPTER II

The land, which from the time they left London had been so ugly as to be
almost invisible, suddenly took form and colour. To the south, beyond a
creek whose further bank was a raw edge of gleaming mud hummocks tufted
with dark spriggy heaths and veined with waterways that shone white
under the cold sky, there stretched a great quiet plain. It stretched
illimitably, and though there were dotted over it red barns and grey
houses and knots of trees growing in fellowship as they do round
steadings, and though its colour was a deep wet fertile green, it did
not seem as if it could be a human territory. It could be regarded only
as a place for the feet of the clouds which, half as tall as the sky,
stood on the far horizon. They passed a station, built high above the
marsh on piles, and looked down on a ford that crossed the mud bed of
the creek to a white road that drove southwards into the plain. A tongue
of the creek ran inwards beside it for a hundred yards or so; above its
humpy mud banks the road protected itself by white wooden railings, and
on its other side a line of telegraph poles ran towards the skyline.

This was the beauty of bleakness, but not as she had known it on the
Pentlands. That was like tragedy. Storms broke on the hills, spread snow
or filled the freshets as with tears, and then departed, leaving the
curlews drilling holes with their cries in the sphere of catharised
clear air; and the people there, men resting on their staves, women at
their but-and-ben doors, spoke with magnificent calm, as if they ha