alked down the field-path to the
floor of the marshes Ellen was well content. This, like the Pentlands,
was far more than a place. It was a mental state, a revisitable peace, a
country on whose soil the people and passions of imagination lived more
intensely than on other earth. There was a wind blowing that was as salt
as sea-winds are, yet travelled more mildly over the estuary land than
it would have over the waves, like some old captain who from old age had
come to live ashore and keeps the roll and bluster of his calling though
he does no more than tell children tales of storms.

And through this clear, unstagnant yet unturbulent air there rose the
wild yet gentle cry of a multitude of birds. It was not the coarse brave
cry of the gull that can breast tempests and dive deep for unfastidious
food. It was not the austere cry of the curlew who dwells on moors when
they are unvisitable by men. This was the voice of some bird appropriate
to the place. It was unhurried. Whatever lived on the plain saw when the
sun rose on its edge shadows as long as living things ever see them, and
watched them shrink till noon, and lengthen out again till sundown; and
time must have seemed the slower for being so visible. It had the sound
of water in it. Whatever lived here spent half its life expecting the
running of waveless but briny tides up the creeks, through mud-paved
culverts into the dykes that fed the wet marshes with fresh wetness; and
the other half deploring their slow, sluggish sucking back to the sea.
Sorrow or any other intemperance of feeling seemed a discourteous
disturbance of an atmosphere filled with this resigned harmony.

Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over
the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.
Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she
made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable
later in the story he would meet a violent death. A man fled over the
marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke's edge,
buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the
lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it
was safe to come. Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.
Perhaps a sailor's widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live
there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to
travel when he obeyed her n