f gray walls that links the village to the hill farms.

The light in its upper window burned till dawn, a sign to the brooding
and solitary land. Up there, in the low room with its sunken ceiling,
John Greatorex lay in the big bed and rallied a little as the clean
air from the moors lapped him like water. For the doctor had thrown
open all the windows of the house before he left. Presently Mrs. Gale,
the untrained village nurse, would come and shut them in terror, and
John Greatorex's pneumonia would get the upper hand. That was how the
fight went on, with Steven Rowcliffe on John Greatorex's side and Mrs.
Gale for the pneumonia. It was ten to one against John Greatorex and
the doctor, for John Greatorex was most of the time unconscious and
the doctor called but once or twice a day, while Mrs. Gale was always
there to shut the windows as fast as he opened them. In the length and
breadth of the Dale there wasn't another woman who would not have done
the same. She was secure from criticism. If she didn't know how to
nurse pneumonia, who did? Seeing that her own husband had died of it.

Young Rowcliffe was a dalesman and he knew his people. In six months
his face had grown stiff in the struggle with them. It was making his
voice stern and his eyes hard, so that they could see nothing round
him but stupidity and distrust and an obstinacy even greater than his
own.

Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. In his
big provincial hospital he had had it practically his own way. He had
faced a thousand horrible and intractable diseases with a thousand
appliances and with an army of assistants and trained nurses under
him. And if in his five years' private practice in Leeds he had come
to grips with human nature, it had been at any rate a fair fight. If
his work was harder his responsibility was less. He still had trained
nurses under him; and if a case was beyond him there were specialists
with whom he could consult.

Here he was single-handed. He was physician and surgeon and specialist
and nurse in one. He had few appliances and no assistant beside naked
and primeval nature, the vast high spaces, the clean waters and clean
air of the moors.

Yet it was precisely these things that his romantic youth had cried
for--that solitary combat and communion, that holy and solitary aid.

At thirty Rowcliffe was still in his romantic youth.

He had all its appearances about him. A life of continual labor
and dis