could not bear to hear Abel play. Just as some childless women with all
their accumulated stores of love cannot bear to see a mother with her
child, so Maray Woodus, with her sealed genius, her incapacity for
expression, could not bear to hear the easy self-expression of another.
For Abel was in his way a master of his art; he had dark places in his
soul, and that is the very core of art and its substance. He had the
lissom hands and cheerful self-absorption that bring success.

He had met Maray at an Eisteddfod that had been held in days gone by on
a hill five miles from the Callow, called God's Little Mountain, and
crowned by a chapel. She had listened, swaying and weeping to the surge
and lament of his harp, and when he won the harper's prize and laid it
in her lap she had consented to be married in the chapel at the end of
the Eisteddfod week. That was nineteen years ago, and she was fled like
the leaves and the birds of departed summers; but God's Little Mountain
still towered as darkly to the eastward; the wind still leapt sheer
from the chapel to the young larches of the Callow; nothing had changed
at all; only one more young, anxious, eager creature had come into the
towering, subluminous scheme of things. Hazel had her mother's eyes,
strange, fawn-coloured eyes like water, and in the large clear irises
were tawny flecks. In their shy honesty they were akin to the little
fox's. Her hair, too, of a richer colour than her father's, was tawny
and foxlike, and her ways were graceful and covert as a wild
creature's.

She stood in the lane above the cottage, which nestled below with its
roof on a level with the hedge-roots, and watched the sun dip. The red
light from the west stained her torn old dress, her thin face, her
eyes, till she seemed to be dipped in blood. The fox, wistfulness in
her expression and the consciousness of coming supper in her mind,