d once more, and again along the range of the rugged pikes, calling
the mare by the half-articulate cry she knew so well, and listening
for her answering neigh, but hearing only the surging of the wind or
the rumble of the falling ghyll; then on and on, and still on.

When the earliest gleams of light flecked the east, Ralph was standing
at the head of the Screes. Slowly the gray bars stretched across the
sky, wider and more wide, brighter and more bright, now changed to
yellow and now to pink, chasing the black walls of darkness that died
away on every side. In the basin below, at the foot of the steep
Screes, whose sides rumbled with rolling stones, lay the black mere,
half veiled by the morning mist. Still veiled, too, were the dales of
Ireton, but far away, across the undulating plains through which the
river rambled, flowed the wide Western Sea, touched at its utmost bar
by the silvery light of the now risen sun.

Ralph turned about and walked back, with the flush of the sky
reflected on his pale and stony face. His lantern, not yet
extinguished, burned small and feeble in his hand. Another night was
breaking to another day; another and another would yet break, and all
the desolation of a heart, the ruin of many hearts--what was it before
Nature's unswerving and unalterable course! The phantasms of a night
that had answered to his hallucinations were as nothing to the
realities of a morning whose cruel light showed him only more plainly
the blackness of his despair.

The sentiments of horror which now possessed him were more terrible
because more spiritual than before. To know no sepulture! The idea was
horrible in itself, horrible in its association with an old Hebrew
curse more remorseless than the curse of Cain, most horrible of all
because to Ralph's heightened imagination it seemed to be a symbol--a
symbol of retribution past and to come.

Yes, it was as he had thought, as he had half thought; God's hand was
on him--on him of all others, and on others only through him. Having
once conceived this idea in its grim totality, having once fully
received the impress of it from the violence and suddenness of a
ghastly occurrence, Ralph seemed to watch with complete
self-consciousness the action of the morbid fancy on his mind. He
traced it back to the moment when the truth (or what seemed to him the
truth) touching the murder of Wilson had been flashed upon him by a
look from Simeon Stagg. He traced it yet farthe