ove to her because she was
too young.

There was a curious colour of relief about this decision, and it was
with a kind of gusto that he kept repeating it to himself all the long
way that spread about before them after they passed Bavelaw Castle, the
whitewashed farmhouse that was the anti-climax of the avenue. Two
servant-girls were laying clothes on a bleaching-green within its dykes,
the one taking them down from a clothes-line, the other laying them down
on the grass, and they were exchanging cries that seemed at that
distance wordless expressions of simple being like the calls of the
whaups that circled above them. Here was a district remote from all
human complexity, in which it was very sweet to walk with this young
girl.

The road stopped, for this was no place where the marketing could spin
along to any business, and two grassy tracks went forward, both marked
by bare, uninscribed posts, as if they led to destinations too unvisited
to need a name. The one they did not take climbed over the grey shoulder
of the range, and the other brought them into an eastward valley where
there was for the moment no wind and a serenity that was surely
perpetual. The cries of the hill-birds did but drill little holes in the
clear hemisphere of silence that lay over this place. The slopes on
either side, thickly covered with mats of heather and bristling mountain
herbage, and yet lean and rocky, were like the furry sides of emaciated
animals, and up above bare black summits confronted the sky. It was the
extremity of bleak beauty. And, unafraid of the grimness, Ellen ran on
ahead, her arms crooked back funnily because she had her hands in her
pocket to keep the coconut-ice tin from rattling against the protractor,
her red hair streaming a yard behind. He absorbed the sight of her so
greedily that it immediately seemed as if it were a recollected sight
over which he had pondered and felt tenderness for many years, and he
wondered if perhaps he had seen someone like her before. But of course
he never had. There was no one in the world like her.

"Listen, we're coming to the waterfall! Do you not hear it!" she cried
back to him; and they listened together, smiling because it was such fun
to do anything together, to the risping, whistling sound of a wind-blown
waterfall. "It comes down peat-red," she told him gloatingly, and with
an air of showing off a private treasure she led him to the grey fold in
the hills where the Logan Bu