.'

'It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, 'to see them in that
house. If you knew the things that used to go on there in old days--the
savages that lived there. And then to see those three delicately
brought-up children going in and out of the parlour where old Leyburn
used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a
white tie, and the same men touching their hats to him who had
belaboured him when he was a boy at the village school--it was queer.'

'A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. 'Well, and then
he died and the family lived on?'

'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the most
interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah in
these valleys,' said the vicar, smiling. 'I don't count for much, she
counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me their
secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them and
her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they
take it from her when they won't take it from us. Perhaps it is the
feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation of
Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whisky-drinking stock
should have ended in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine
Leyburn.'

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of feeling.
His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied expression.

'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.'

'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different
tone.

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and the
young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the point where
only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From here his eye
commanded the whole of the upper end of the valley--a bare, desolate
recess filled with evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray
and purple crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening fell
marked the course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater
district. Below him were church and parsonage; beyond, the stone-filled
babbling river, edged by intensely green fields, which melted
imperceptibly into the browner stretches o