tains--from their peasants to their plants!'

'I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and scrambling among
them,' she said, smiling.

'Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter?'

'Oh, not so much, of course! But people must be helped and taught in the
winter. And our winter is often not as hard as yours down south.'

'Do you go on with that night school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?' he
said, with another note in his voice.

Catherine looked at him and colored. 'Rose has been telling tales,' she
said. 'I wish she would leave my proceedings alone. Poll Ghyll is the
family bone of contention at present. Yes, I go on with it. I always
take a lantern when the night is dark, and I know every inch of the
ground, and Bob is always with me--aren't you, Bob?'

And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob looked up at her,
blinking with a proudly confidential air, as though to remind her that
there were a good many such secrets between them.

'I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,' he cried, the
hidden emotion piercing through, 'the night wind blowing about you, the
black mountains to right and left of you, some little stream perhaps
running beside you for company, your dog guarding you, and all good
Angels going with you.'

She blushed still more deeply; the impetuous words affected her
strangely.

'Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. 'It is a very small and
very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. Elemere; the
rain has beaten us!'

He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out
in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side
gleamed green and livid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging
out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in
the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness;
children with their petticoats over their heads ran homeward along the
road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading
broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it
came and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was beating
in their faces.

'Caught!' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 'Let me help
you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.'

He flung it around her and struggled into his own Mackintosh. The vicar
in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair,
then hurried af