'Awhile since, afore you were born, a cow fell down that there place,
hundreds of feet.'

'Did they save her?'

'Laws, no! She was all of a jelly.'

Hazel broke out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she
sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering,
flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that
epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She,
in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of
Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common
with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with
grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed
frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her
almost crazy grief and rage.

'Whatever's come o'er ye?' said her father now. 'You're too nesh,
that's what you be, nesh-spirited.'

He could not understand; for the art in him was not that warm,
suffering thing, creation, but hard, brightly polished talent.

Hazel stood at the edge of the steep grey cliff, her hands folded, a
curious fatalism in her eyes.

'There'll be summat bad'll come to me hereabouts,' she said--'summat
bad and awful.'