a few of the remoter valleys they still linger, though
beneath the surface. Either of the Backhouses, or Mary in her days of
health, would have suffered many things rather than allow a stranger
to suppose they placed the smallest credence in the story of Bleacliff
Tarn. But, all the same, the story which each had beard in childhood, on
stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful with the sounds
of tempest, had grown up with them, had entered deep into the tissue of
consciousness. In Mary's imagination the ideas and images connected with
it had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with
a living pursuing terror. But they were present, though in a duller,
blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle; and as the weeks
passed on, and the days lengthened toward midsummer, a sort of brooding
horror seemed to settle on the house.

Mary grew weaker and weaker; her cough kept Jim awake at nights; once or
twice when he went to help her with a piece of work which not even her
extraordinary will could carry her through, her hand burnt him like a
hot cinder. But she kept all other women out of the house by her mad,
strange ways; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state,
she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its former
stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it brought out
between the tempestuous, vindictive soul and the shaken weakness of
frame.

A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong with her was
phthisis, complicated with insanity; and the insanity, instead of taking
the hopeful optimistic tinge which is characteristic of the insanity of
consumption, had rather assumed the color of the events from which the
disease itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind
and body--the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots
as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its principal signs
was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It never occurred to her as
possible that her life should be prolonged beyond that limit. Every
night, as she dragged herself up the steep little staircase to her room,
she checked off the day which had just passed from the days she had
still to live. She had made all her arrangements; she had even sewed
with her own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but
rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was to be
carried to her grave.

At l