ll, and then
he died and the family lived on?'

'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the
most interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah in
these valleys,' said the vicar smiling. 'I don't count for much,
she counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me their
secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between them and
her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they
take it from her when they won't take it from us. Perhaps it is the
feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation of
Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whiskey-drinking stock
should have ended in anything so saintly and so beautiful as Catherine
Leyburn.'

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of feeling.
His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied expression.

'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.'

'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different
tone.

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and the
young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the point
where only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From here his eye
commanded the whole of upper end of the valley--a bare desolate recess
filled evening shadow, and walled round by masses of gray and purple
crag, except in one spot, where a green intervening fell marked the
course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater district.
Below him were church and parsonage; beyond, the stone-filled babbling
river, edged by intensely green fields, which melted imperceptibly
into the browner stretches of the opposite mountain. Most of the scene,
except where the hills at the end rose highest and shut out the sun,
was bathed in quiet light. The white patches on the farm-houses, the
heckberry trees along the river and the road, emphasized the golden rays
which were flooding into the lower valley as into a broad green cup.
Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were fruit-trees in blossom;
the air was mild and fragrant, though to the young man from the warmer
south there was still a bracing quality in the soft western breeze which
blew about him.