nce recognized as her death sentence.

What had she seen? An effect of moonlit mist--a shepherd-boy bent on a
practical joke--a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks?
What had she heard? The evening greeting of a passer by, wafted down
to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm
enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain,
those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who
can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend
of the ghost--of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the
tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end
of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor
every Midsummer Night with her moaning child upon her arm--had flashed
into Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind
her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists.
To see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by
the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive
the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along
with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen
her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom.

A week later she had disappeared from home and from the neighborhood.
The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken some money with her,
and all trace of her was lost. The father had a period of gloomy
taciturnity, during which his principal relief was got out of jeering
and girding at his elder brother; the noodle's eyes wandered and
glittered more; his shrunken frame seemed more shrunken as he sat
dangling his spindle less from the shaft of the carrier's cart; his
absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused with less
buoyancy and inventiveness than usual. But otherwise all went on as
before. John Backhouse took no step, and for nine months nothing was
heard of his daughter.

At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, Coming back from the
Wednesday round with the cart, entered the farm kitchen, while John
Backhouse was still wrangling at one of the other farmhouses of the
hamlet about some disputed payment. The old man came in cold and weary,
and the sight of the half-tended kitchen and neglected fire--they paid
a neighbor to do the housework, as far as the care of her own seven
children would let her--suddenly re