ent, for all I know. You look to me as
though you'd been a success. Don't smile. I mean it. You look as though
you'd climbed. You haven't the air of an eldest son whose way is cut out
for him, with fifty thousand a year for compensation. What have you been
doing? What has been your work in life?"

"The opposite of yours."

He felt himself a ruffian, but he consoled himself with the thought that
the end at which he aimed was good. It seemed ungenerous to meet her
simple honesty by such obvious repartee, but he held on to see where the
trail would lead.

"That doesn't seem very clear," she said in answer. "Since I came
out here I've been a sort of riverine missionary, an apostle with no
followers, a reformer with a plan of salvation no one will accept."

"We are not stronger than tradition, than the long custom of ages bred
in the bone and practised by the flesh. You cannot change a people by
firmans; you must educate them. Meanwhile, things go on pretty much the
same. You are a generation before your time. It is a pity, for you have
saddened your youth, and you may never live to see accomplished what you
have toiled for."

"Oh, as to that--as to that..." She smoothed back her hair lightly, and
her eyes wandered over the distant hills-mauve and saffron and opal,
and tender with the mist of evening. "What does it matter!" she added.
"There are a hundred ways to live, a hundred things to which one might
devote one's life. And as the years went on we'd realise how every
form of success was offset by something undone in another direction,
something which would have given us joy and memory and content--so it
seems. But--but we can only really work out one dream, and it is the
working out--a little or a great distance--which satisfies. I have no
sympathy with those who, living out their dreams, turn regretfully to
another course or another aim, and wonder-wonder, if a mistake hasn't
been made. Nothing is a mistake which comes of a good aim, of the desire
for wrongs righted, the crooked places made straight. Nothing matters
so that the dream was a good one and the heart approves and the eyes see
far."

She spoke as though herself in a dream, her look intent on the glowing
distance, as though unconscious of his presence.

"It's good to have lived among mountains and climbed them when you were
young. It gives you bigger ideas of things. You could see a long way
with the sun behind you, from Skaw Fell."

He spoke in a low