burn in wrath; while the great moors, dark in the foreground,
raised themselves like barriers--uplands of desolation, across
which no path of hope stretched its trend for returning feet.

As the girl climbed the Scar Foot the western sky was toning down
to grays, while beyond, and seen through an oval-shaped rift in
their sombre colours, lay a distant streak of amber that, moment
by moment, slowly disappeared under the closing lids of evening
cloud--the eye of weary day wooed to slumber by the hush of
illimitable sweeps of moor. Even so would Amanda fain have closed
her eyes and sunk to rest amid the purple clouds of heather that,
like a great sky, lay for miles around her feet.

Passing through Nockcliffe plantation, a half-mile of woodland
that straggled along the steep sides of a clough, a drop of rain
fell between the branches and coursed down her cheek--a cheek
fevered from want of tears, and flaming with a sense of shame.
Then a low wind blew--a mere sob, but so preludious, so
prophetic!--followed by a silence that discovered, as never
before, the sense of her own loneliness, and in which she heard
the tread of her own light footfall over the moss and herbage of
the path she travelled.

Emerging from the plantation, an angry gust, laden with cold
drops, dashed itself in her face, and she knew from the
weather-lore which she, as a child of the hills, had learned in
past years, that a wild night was between her and the house whose
shelter she sought in her despair.

Phenomenally rapid was the onrush of the storm. At first the rain