a bed
for the night, took my carriage a little farther, then, knowing I had
friends in these parts, I came on to explore.'

Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper.

'You are the first tourist,' she said coolly, 'who has ever stayed in
Whindale.'

'Tourist! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of
Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being
with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my
Murray in the railway carriage.'

He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection of his strong
sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had been so easy to stand
on her dignity, to remember whenever he was friendly that the night
before he had been distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to
be anything but natural--the child of the moment!

'You are neither more practical nor more economical than when I saw you
last', she said demurely. 'When did you leave Norway?'

They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flaxman, who had
been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete, was
giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles shown
by the primitive democrats of Norway. As they passed a gap in vicarage
hedge, laughing and chatting, Rose became aware of a window and a gray
head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash,
instantly suppressed, that shoot across her face.

Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the house where
Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and the poor bed-ridden Jim
still lived. They mounted the path behind it, and plunged into the
hazel plantation which had sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable
night. But when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a
scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of High
Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it seemed to Rose
that when she had once let him help her over a rock her hand was never
her own again. He kept it an almost constant prisoner on one pretext or
another till they were at the top.

Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside her, lifting
his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below had been warm and
relaxing. Here it played upon them both with a delicious life-giving
freshness. He looked round on the great hollow bosom of the fell,
the crags buttressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the
val