now. His mood had changed; he was sullen. His
sister always made him feel like a disgraced dog. He shuffled on his
feet.

"She's a good girl," he muttered at last, and then with a confused look
about him, as though he were searching for something, he stumbled out
of the room.

Meanwhile Maggie went on her way. She chose instinctively her path,
through the kitchen garden at the back of the village, down the hill by
the village street, over the little bridge that crossed the rocky
stream of the Dreot, and up the steep hill that led on to the outskirts
of Rothin Moor. The day, although she had no eyes for it, was one of
those sudden impulses of misty warmth that surprise the Glebeshire
frosts. The long stretch of the moor was enwrapped by a thin silver
network of haze; the warmth of the sun, seen so dimly that it was like
a shadow reflected in a mirror, struck to the very heart of the soil.
Where but yesterday there had been iron frost there was now soft
yielding earth; it was as though the heat of the central fires of the
world pressed dimly upward through many miles of heavy weighted
resistance, straining to the light and air. Larks, lost in golden mist,
circled in space; Maggie could feel upon her face and neck and hands
the warm moisture; the soil under her feet, now hard, now soft, seemed
to tremble with some happy anticipation; the moor, wrapped in its misty
colour, had no bounds; the world was limitless space with hidden
streams, hidden suns.

The moor had a pathetic attraction for her, because not very long ago a
man and a woman had been lost, only a few steps from Borhedden Farm, in
the mist--lost their way and been frozen during the night. Poor things!
lovers, perhaps, they had been.

Maggie felt that here she could walk for miles and miles and that there
was nothing to stop her; the clang of a gate, a house, a wall, a human
voice was intolerable to her.

Her first thought as she went forward was disgust at her own weakness;
once again she had been betrayed by her feelings. She could remember no
single time when they had not betrayed her. She recalled now with an
intolerable self-contempt her thoughts of her father at the time of the
funeral and the hours that followed. It seemed to her now that she had
only softened towards his memory because she had believed that he had
left her money--and now, when she saw that he had treated her
contemptuously, she found him once again the cruel, mean figure that
she