d out from the farmhouse and were fawning around her companion. In
the background a gray-bearded shepherd, with Scottish plaid thrown over
his shoulder, raised his hat.

"It isn't real, is it?" she asked, clinging for a moment to John
Strangewey's arm.

He patted one of the dogs and smiled down at her.

"Why not? William Elwick there is a very real shepherd, I can assure
you. He has sat on these hills for the last sixty-eight years."

She looked at the old man almost with awe.

"It is like the Bible!" she murmured. "Fancy the sunrises he must have
seen, and the sunsets! The coming and the fading of the stars, the
spring days, the music of the winds in these hollow places, booming to
him in the night-time! I want to talk to him. May I?"

He shook his head. The old man was already shambling off.

"Better not," he advised. "You would be disappointed, for William has
the family weakness--he cannot bear the sight of a woman. You see, he is
pretending now that there is something wrong with the hill flock. You
asked where the land was that we tilled. Now look down. Hold my arm if
you feel giddy."

She followed the wave of his ash stick. The valley sheer below them, and
the lower hills, on both sides, were parceled out into fields, enclosed
within stone walls, reminding her, from the height at which they stood,
of nothing so much as the quilt upon her bed.

"That's where all our pasture is," he told her, "and our arable land. We
grow a great deal of corn in the dip there. All the rest of the
hillside, and the moorlands, of course, are fit for nothing but grazing;
but there are eleven hundred acres down there from which we can raise
almost anything we choose."

Her eyes swept this strange tract of country backward and forward. She
saw the men like specks in the fields, the cows grazing in the pasture
like toy animals. Then she turned and looked at the neat row of stacks
and the square of farm-buildings.

"I am trying hard to realize that you are a farmer and that this is your
life," she said.

He swung open the wooden gate of the churchyard, by which they were
standing. There was a row of graves on either side of the prim path.

"Suppose," he suggested, "you tell me about yourself now--about your own
life."

The hills parted suddenly as she stood there looking southward. Through
the chasm she seemed to see very clearly the things beyond. Her own
life, her own world, spread itself out--a world of easy triumphs, o