ven dreamt for a moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And
then ten minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression,
blown away by the winds--or charmed away by a happy voice, a manly
presence, a keen responsive eye?

Elsmere, indeed, was gayety itself. He kept up an incessant war with
Rose; he had a number of little jokes going at the vicar's expense,
which kept that good man in a half-protesting chuckle most of the way;
he cleared every gate that presented itself in first-rate Oxford form,
and climbed every point of rock with a cat-like agility that set the
girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under which he had foisted
himself on Whindale.

'How fine all this black purple is!' he cried, as they topped the ridge,
and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded on the other side by
line after line of mountain, Wetherlam and the Pikes and Fairfield in
the far distance, piled sombrely under a sombre sky. 'I had grown quite
tired of the sun. He had done his best to make you commonplace.'

'Tired of the sun in Westmoreland?' said Catherine, with a little
mocking wonder. 'How wanton how prodigal!'

'Does it deserve a Nemesis?' he said laughing. 'Drowning from now till I
depart? No matter. I can bear a second deluge with an even mind. On this
enchanted soil all things are welcome!'

She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a tribute
to the country, or to his own recovered health. He stood leaning on his
stick, gazing, however, not at the view but at her. The others stood a
little way off, laughing and chattering. As their eyes met, a strange
new pulse leapt up in Catherine.

'The wind is very boisterous here,' she said, with a shiver. 'I think we
ought to be going on.'

And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their shelter till
they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where they were to have
tea. The pony carriage was already standing in front of the inn, and
Mrs. Thornburgh's gray curls shaking at the window.

'William!' she shouted, 'bring them in. Tea is just ready, and Mr.
Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many new names in the
visitors' book!'

While the girls went in, Elsmere stood looking a moment at the inn, the
bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic Westmoreland scene. The
low whitewashed inn, with its newly painted signboard, was to his right,
the pony at the door lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its
gre