d Catherine still at her post far from home on
this dark stormy evening. But in the glow of joy which her presence had
brought him he was still capable of all sorts of delicate perceptions
and reasonings. His quick imagination carried him through the scene from
which she had just momentarily escaped. He had understood the
exaltation of her look and tone. If love spoke at all, ringed with such
surroundings, it must be with its most inward and spiritual voice, as
those speak who feel 'the Eternities' about them.

But the darkness hid her from him so well that he had to feel out the
situation for himself. He could not trace it in her face.

'We must go right up to the top of the pass,' she said to him as he held
a gate open for her which led them into a piece of larch plantation on
the mountain-side. 'The ghost is supposed to walk along this bit of
road above the houses, till it reaches the heath on the top, and then
it turns toward Bleacliff Tarn, which lies higher up to the right, under
High Fell.'

'Do you imagine your report will have any effect?'

'At any rate,' she said, sighing, 'it seemed to me that it might
divert her thoughts a little from the actual horror of her own summons.
Anything is better than the torture of that one fixed idea as she lies
there.'

'What is that?' said Robert, startled a little by some ghostly sounds
in front of them. The little wood was almost dark, and he could see
nothing.

'Only a horse trotting on in front of us,' said Catherine; 'our voices
frightened him, I suppose. We shall be out on the fell again directly.'

And as they quitted the trees, a dark bulky form to the left suddenly
lifted a shadowy head from the grass, and clattered down the slope.

A cluster of white-stemmed birches just ahead of them, caught whatever
light was still left in the atmosphere, their feathery tops bending and
swaying against the sky.

'How easily, with a mind attuned, one could people this whole path with
ghosts!' said Robert. 'Look at those stems, and that line of stream
coming down to the right, and listen to the wind among the fern.'

For they were passing a little gully deep in bracken, up which the blast
was tearing its tempestuous way.

Catherine shivered a little, and the sense of physical exhaustion,
which had been banished like everything else--doubt, humiliation,
bitterness--by the one fact of his presence, came back on her.

'There is something, rather awful in this dark and stor