Castle. But the
quality of none of these things reached Ellen because she was wrapped in
fear of this unloving woman who was walking on ahead of her, her stick
dragging on the ground. She was whistling through her teeth like an
angry man; and once she laughed disagreeably to herself.

They came to a broken iron railing whose few standing divisions ran
askew alongside the footpath and down the hillside towards the marshes,
rusted and prohibitive and futile.

"Look at them! Look at them!" exclaimed Marion in a sudden space of
fury. "The Hallelujah Army put them up. It's like them. Some idea of
raising money for the funds by charging Bank Holiday trippers twopence
to see the Castle. It was a fool's idea. They know nothing. The East End
trippers that come here can't climb. They're too dog-tired. They go
straight from the railway-station to Prittlebay or Bestcliffe sands and
lie down with handkerchiefs over their faces. Those that push as far as
Roothing lie don on the slope of the sea-wall and stay there for the
day." She kicked a fallen railing as she stepped over it into the
enclosed land. "The waste of good iron! You're not a farmer's daughter,
Ellen; you don't know how precious stuff like this is. And look at the
thistle and the couch-grass. This used to be a good sheep-feed. The land
going sick all round us, with these Hallelujah Armies and small holdings
and such-like. In ten years it'll be a scare-crow of a countryside. I
wish one could clear them up and burn them in heaps as one does the dead
leaves in autumn." Fatigue fell upon her. She seemed exhausted by the
manufacture of so much malice. With an abrupt and listless gesture she
pointed her stick at the Castle. "It isn't much, you see," she said
apologetically. And indeed there was little enough. There were just the
two towers on the summit and the two on the slope of the hill whose
bases were set on grassy mounds so that they stood level with the
others, and these had been built of such stockish material that they had
not had features given them by ruin. "I'm afraid it's not a fair
exchange for Edinburgh Castle, Ellen. But there's a good view up there
between the two upper towers. Where the fools have put a flagstaff. I
won't come. I'm tired...."

She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself,
"She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half
because she wants to get away from me. I was a fool to frighten her by
losing