She knew the cave so well--every stone on the floor, every crack in the walls where tiny ferns grew--that she could have found her way about it blindfold. She often thought that, when she came to die, Ketel's Parlour would remain the most vivid picture in her mind. Death was a familiar meditation to Barbara. She met it so often that it forced itself upon her notice. The destroyer tramped the fells even in summer-time, taking his toll of sheep and lambs, and now and then snatching away a man. But when winter came, with its storms of wind and rain; when it held the becks stiff behind icy bars; when it filled the gullies with drifting snow and levelled dangerous slopes, then it seemed to be a miracle that any living thing should come through it alive. Time and again, between November and March, those whose work took them to the great wastes, would face death, would go where a slip was destruction, where presence of mind, and swift, unerring action meant life; where nothing but the instinct that is born in some men, added to hard-won experience, could bring them safe and sound out of the valley of the shadow to their own hearth-stones. Barbara often wondered how her own end would come. Would she be like a shepherd, who had gone out one wild night to bring the ewes to a more sheltered spot, and who was blown over a precipice? Would she fall into a drift when helping to dig out the sheep, and perish of the suffocating snow in which a sheep may live, but not a human being? Would she grow dizzy when climbing some steep ascent, and fall down to be dashed on the rocks below? Or would she, like her great-grandmother, live for a hundred years, and die at last in the four-poster, with the bridewain on one side of her and the dresser on the other? No; anything but that. She hoped that death would not forget her, as it had forgotten Mistress Lynn, that grim, grey, human Sphynx, which could look back along the years for a century. That such a lot might be hers filled the girl with horror. But she would not believe it. She cared not how death came, but she hoped he would not tarry, for life held nothing now that could make her wish to live. Life was full of renunciation and sacrifice, and she was tired of striving after righteousness. She had not been long alone when she heard a voice calling her: "Barbara! Barbara!" Absorbed in her thoughts, she imagined that the voice came from her inner consciousness, and was spirit speaking unto spirit. But it called again, and this time fell upon her ear with unmistakable urgency: "Barbara!" Lucy was running across the slope, towards the light issuing from the cavern's doorway. She looked excited, her cheeks were aflame, her eyes shining. "You must come with me," she cried. "You must come at once, over the Robber's Rake to the Shepherd's Rest. Joel is dying." She took her sister's hand, and began to draw her towards the door. "Sit down, Lucy, and calm thyself," said Barbara.