To attain such a height she must cut off her right hand and pluck out her right eye. She must set her face firmly in the direction she meant to go. It would be a road of toil, loneliness, sacrifice. She must never cast so much as a glance at that other path, with all its alluring lights and gorgeous flowers, which yet smelt of death. She lifted the books one by one, and laid them on the fire. The white pages grew luminous, the black letters grew blacker, a splash, like blood, blotted them out; they rolled up like a scroll and fell to ashes. Peter Fleming came to the cave on his way home; for he saw the light. Joel was better, and as Timothy was remaining behind at the Shepherd's Rest with him, there was no reason why he should stay. Barbara did not hear the shuffle of his feet on the grass; and unknown to her he was a witness to her action of burning her books. He stood for a moment, hesitated whether to speak, then stole away, as though he had been prying into a secret chamber that his eyes had no right to see. He knew that Barbara would come no more to the night-school. He understood her reasons, and bitterly reproached himself for the sorrow that he had brought upon her. He thought of her fine soul and deplored the narrowing and stifling of her intellect, that must follow this deliberate cutting off of herself from such sources of life. Yet he felt exalted too. In spite of all, he was lifted up by the knowledge of her strength. She seemed to rise and fill the night with her spreading hair, and wide blue eyes, an embodiment of the power of love, which holds all human hearts in the hollow of its immortal hands. CHAPTER XIX THE SHEPHERD'S REST Joel Hart sat on a bench, staring at the fire in the kitchen of the Shepherd's Rest. Timothy Hadwin was bending over a basket of moss and late mountain flowers, dissecting them with a small scalpel, while he held a magnifying glass in his left hand through which he continually peered. The good dame of the inn was spinning, and the whirr of the wheels' rapid turning made a pleasant hum in the room, like the buzzing of bees. Her good man had gone to the nearest market town on business. Outside a cold white mist hugged the fells. Little could be seen but a patch of monotonous landscape in front of the inn, and nothing heard save the thunder of the beck which was in spate. Joel was silent, preoccupied with his thoughts or else sunk in a melancholy mood. Timothy looked at him from under his mild brows, then took a pinch of snuff, and leaning back in his chair said: "You'll soon be well enough to go home, Joel." There was no answer. Either the young man had not heard, or he did not want to talk.