reaction. She locked the door, and turned away, breathing fast as though
under some excitement.

The tears, long held down, were rising, and the room, where a large wood
fire was burning,--wood was the only provision of which there was a
plenty at Bannisdale,--seemed to her suddenly stifling. She went to the
casement window and threw it open. A rush of mild wind came through, and
with it, the roar of the swollen river.

The girl leant forward, bathing her hot face in the wild air. There was a
dark mist of trees below her, trees tossed by the wind; then, far down, a
ray of moonlight on water; beyond, a fell-side, clear a moment beneath a
sky of sweeping cloud; and last of all, highest of all, amid the clouds,
a dim radiance, intermittent and yet steady, like the radiance of moonlit
snow.

A strange nobility and freedom breathed from the wide scene; from its
mere depth below her; from the spacious curve of the river, the mountains
half shown, half hidden, the great race of the clouds, the fresh beating
of the wind. The north spoke to her and the mountains. It was like the
rush of something passionate and straining through her girlish sense,
intensifying all that was already there. What was this thirst, this
yearning, this physical anguish of pity that crept back upon her in all
the pauses of the day and night?

It was nine months since she had lost her father, but all the scenes of
his last days were still so clear to her that it seemed to her often
sheer incredibility that the room, the bed, the helpless form, the noise
of the breathing, the clink of the medicine glasses, the tread of the
doctor, the gasping words of the patient, were all alike fragments and