nquered hope. Then should not, ought not the human heart to
beat again too, revived anew, always full of hope?

Clouds of mist sped across the moor, veiled, indescribable, vague
shapes. There was a whispering before the coming of the wind, a
lisping through the heather and the cotton-grass--it seemed to Kate as
though the Venn had something to tell her. What was it saying? Ah, it
must be for some reason that she had come there, that she felt she was
being held fast as though by a strong and still kind hand.

She walked on with quicker, more elastic steps, as though she were
searching for something.

Her husband was delighted that his wife was so pleased with the
neighbourhood. True, the landscape had no special attraction for
him--was it not very desolate, monotonous and unfertile there? But the
characteristic scenery was certainly harmonious, very harmonious--well,
if she found pleasure in it, it was better than a paradise to him.

They often drove up to Baraque Michel, that lonely inn on the
borders between Belgium and Prussia, in which the douaniers drank their
drams of gin when on the look-out for smugglers, and where the
peat-cutters dry their smocks that the mist has wetted and their
saturated boots at the fire that is always burning on the hearth.

So many crosses in the Venn, so many human beings who have met with
a fatal accident. Kate listened to the men's stories with a secret
shudder--could the Venn be so terrible? and she questioned them again
and again. Was it possible that the man from Xhoffraix, who had driven
off to get peat litter, had been swallowed up there so close to the
road with cart and horse, and that they had never, never seen anything
of him again? And that cross there, so weather-beaten and black, how
had that come into the middle of the marsh? Why had that travelling
journeyman, whose intention it was to go along the high road from
Malmedy to Eupen, gone so far astray? Had it been dark or had there
been a heavy fall of snow so that he could not see, or was it
the cold, that terrible cold, in which a weary man can freeze to death?
Nothing of the kind; only a mist, a sudden mist, which confuses a man
so, that he no longer knows which is forward or which is backward,
which is left or which is right, that he loses all idea of where he is
going, gets away from the road and runs round in a circle like a poor,
mad, terrified animal. And all the mists that rise in the Venn when
daylight disapp