Elfride's emotions were sudden as his in kindling, but the least
of woman's lesser infirmities--love of admiration--caused an
inflammable disposition on his part, so exactly similar to her
own, to appear as meritorious in him as modesty made her own seem
culpable in her.



Chapter IV

'Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap.'


For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time
after dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could
see, first, two bold escarpments sloping down together like the
letter V. Towards the bottom, like liquid in a funnel, appeared
the sea, gray and small. On the brow of one hill, of rather
greater altitude than its neighbour, stood the church which was to
be the scene of his operations. The lonely edifice was black and
bare, cutting up into the sky from the very tip of the hill. It
had a square mouldering tower, owning neither battlement nor
pinnacle, and seemed a monolithic termination, of one substance
with the ridge, rather than a structure raised thereon. Round the
church ran a low wall; over-topping the wall in general level was
the graveyard; not as a graveyard usually is, a fragment of
landscape with its due variety of chiaro-oscuro, but a mere
profile against the sky, serrated with the outlines of graves and
a very few memorial stones. Not a tree could exist up there:
nothing but the monotonous gray-green grass.