Some fifteen
months before this Midsummer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely
old house in which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in
which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so deep that no
doctor could reach them, her mother had passed away. She had been then
strong and well favored, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed
beauty, and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such
as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch. At the bottom
of all the outward _sauvagerie_, however, there was a heart, and strong
wants, which only affection and companionship could satisfy and tame.
Neither were to be found in sufficient measure within her home. Her
father and she were on fairly good terms, and had for each other, up to
a certain point, the natural instincts of kinship. On her uncle, whom
she regarded as half-witted, she bestowed alternate tolerance and jeers.
She was, indeed, the only person whose remonstrances ever got under the
wool with old Jim, and her sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing effect on
his curious nonchalance which nothing else had. For the rest, they had
no neighbors with whom the girl could fraternize, and Whinborough was
too far off to provide any adequate food for her vague hunger after
emotion and excitement.

In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse
attractions of a young farmer in the neighboring valley of Shanmoor. He
was a brute with a handsome face, and a nature in which whatever grains
of heart and conscience might have been interfused with the original
composition had been long since swamped. Mary, who had recklessly
flung herself into his power on one or two occasions, from a mixture of
motives, partly passion, partly jealousy, partly ennui, awoke one day to
find herself ruined, and a grim future hung before her. She had realized
her doom for the first time in its entirety on the Midsummer Day
preceding that we are now describing. On that day, she had walked over
to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her
betrayer the fulfilment of his promise of marriage. He had laughed at
her, and she had fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those
torturing terrors which only a woman _in extremis_ can know. And on her
way back she had seen the ghost or 'bogle' of Deep Crag; the ghost had
spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having
received what she at o