BOOK III




BOOK I


CHAPTER I

"I must be turning back. A dreary day for anyone coming fresh to these
parts!"

So saying, Mr. Helbeck stood still--both hands resting on his thick
stick--while his gaze slowly swept the straight white road in front of
him and the landscape to either side.

Before him stretched the marsh lands of the Flent valley, a broad
alluvial plain brought down by the rivers Flent and Greet on their way to
the estuary and the sea. From the slight rising ground on which he stood,
he could see the great peat mosses about the river-mouths, marked here
and there by lines of weather-beaten trees, or by more solid dots of
black which the eye of the inhabitant knew to be peat stacks. Beyond the
mosses were level lines of greyish white, where the looping rivers passed
into the sea--lines more luminous than the sky at this particular moment
of a damp March afternoon, because of some otherwise invisible radiance,
which, miles away, seemed to be shining upon the water, slipping down to
it from behind a curtain of rainy cloud.

Nearer by, on either side of the high road which cut the valley from east