icissitudes had left behind engraven on his heart a message
and lesson, and it was not altogether a hopeful one. He saw that fate
hung by a thread; that our lives are turned on the pivot of some mere
chance; that, traced back to their source, all our joys and all our
sorrows appear to come of some accident no more momentous than a word
or a look. In solemn tones he seemed to say that there is a
plague-spot of evil at the core of this world and this life, and that
it infects everything. We may do our best--we should do our best--but
we are not therefore to expect reward. Perhaps that reward will come
to us while we live. More likely it will be the crown laid on our
grave. Happy are we if our loves find fulfilment--if no curse rests
upon them. Should we hope on? He hardly knew. Destiny works her own
way!

Thus they talked in that solitary house among the mountains. They sat
far into the night, these rude sons and this daughter of the hills,
groping in their own uncertain, unlearned way after solutions of
life's problems that wiser heads than theirs ages on ages before and
since have never compassed, shouting for echoes into the voiceless
caverns of the world's great and awful mysteries.

CHAPTER XVI. AT SUNRISE ON THE RAISE.

The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel.

At sunrise the following morning two men walked through Wythburn
towards the hillock known as the Raise, down the long road that led to
the south. The younger man had attained to the maturity of full
manhood. Brawny and stalwart, with limbs that strode firmly over the
ground; with an air of quiet and reposeful power; with a steadily
poised head; with a full bass voice, soft, yet deep; with a face that
had for its utmost beauty the beauty of virile strength and
resolution, softened, perhaps, into tenderness of expression by
washing in the waters of sorrow,--such, now, was Ralph Ray. Over a
jerkin he wore the long sack coat, belted and buckled, of the dalesmen
of his country. Beneath a close-fitting goatskin cap his short, wavy
hair lay thick and black. A pack was strapped about him from shoulder
to waist. He carried the long staff of a mountaineer.

Were there in the wide world of varying forms and faces a form and a
face so much unlike his own as were those of the man who walked, nay,
jerked along, in short, fitful paces, by his side? Little and slight,
with long thin gray hair and