They had reached the highest point of the track, where two masses of rock, ranged on either side, form a ruined gateway to the Pass. From there the ground slopes quickly to the Styhead Tarn, and as they skirted its edge they heard the welcoming neigh of Kate's horse. It was tied to the far end of a primitive footbridge which spans the beck in the valley but a few yards beyond. Gordon lit the lanthorn and fastened it to the saddle, and, standing on the end of the bridge, lifted the girl on to the horse's back. For a moment they remained there, she in the shadow, he with the light streaming full on his face, and then without a word Kate gathered up the reins and rode off eastwards along the Pass. She felt that he was still standing on the bridge in the darkness, but she never turned her head. After a while, she heard him cry out her name "Kitty!" The sound echoed down the hollow in a despairing wail, like a death-cry, and was faintly repeated by the mountains that closed her in, but she only pressed her horse the harder, and rode more steadily towards her home. CHAPTER VII In a sense, indeed, it was a death-cry that she heard. For Gordon, as he watched her ride away, and listened to the lanthorn clanking against the saddle, knew that his real self went with her. The extended sympathy for his fellows which he had fostered during these last two years, his interest in their comings and goings, his ambitions and his assiduous patience in straining after their attainment--in fact, the finer qualities of his nature seemed not merely to have been awakened by his one great passion, but to have gained their being from it and to be dependent upon it for their life. They were, if one may use the phrase, the reflex of his imaginative belief in the worth of his mistress--a belief founded purely upon sentiment and sustained by misconceptions of different points in her bearing, such as a certain air of disdain she habitually wore, which was in itself only the result of a fastidious intuition in matters of taste and the like, and which Gordon mistook for the visible sign of an innate superiority. And so this mute farewell meant something more to him than even the final parting from the woman he loved; it was also a parting from his gentler nature. All that there was of goodness and truth in him had come into his life through Kate Nugent, and now that she took her gift back with her as she went, she left him stripped almost of his humanity, bare and scarred as the rugged crags surrounding him. So intense and poignant grew the feeling of his loss, that he came to fancy, with the imagery peculiar to his bent, that his very soul was the flame of the candle in the lanthorn, which he saw, like a red star, moving farther and farther into the distance.