'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And perhaps the
most interesting thing of all has been the development of his eldest
daughter. She has watched over her mother, she has brought up her
sisters; but much more than that: she has become a sort of Deborah
in these valleys,' said the vicar smiling. 'I don't count for much,
she counts for a great deal. I can't get the people to tell me
their secrets, she can. There is a sort of natural sympathy between
them and her. She nurses them, she scolds them, she preaches to
them, and they take it from her when they won't take it from us.
Perhaps it is the feeling of blood. Perhaps they think it as
mysterious a dispensation of Providence as I do that that brutal,
swearing, whiskey-drinking stock should have ended in anything so
saintly and so beautiful as Catherine Leyburn.'

The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden tremor of
feeling. His wife, however, looked at him with a dissatisfied
expression.

'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but Catherine.
People generally like the other two much better. Catherine is so
stand-off.'

'Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a different
tone.

Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went in, and
the young man went sauntering up the climbing garden-path to the
point where only a railing divided it from the fell-side. From
here his eye commanded the whole of upper end of the valley--a bare