When she was young, men and women lived upon the strong meat of exertion and adventure. She said that they were giants compared to their sons and daughters, who could not digest anything more solid than pap. The old woman had a great contempt for the rising generation that she saw around her. She flung many a gibe at them, when they gathered in the kitchen, as they sometimes did of a winter evening, to hear her recount stories that made their hair stand on end and their flesh creep. But in the midst of her quips and quiddities, she would sometimes break off to talk of Barbara. As her own energies began to fail, she drew vitality from the robust nature of her great-granddaughter. The girl was true kin to the strenuous souls of old. She had in her veins the blood of shepherd princes, her spirit was the spirit of kings--stern perhaps, silent perhaps, but tempered as steel, unflinching before lightning flash, or whirlwind, ready as her forefathers had been to face the moss-troopers should they ever come again to rob the sheep-fold. But Barbara was born three generations too late. She was like an eagle with clipped wings, and had never a chance to show the mettle of her make. Sometimes Barbara was present at these story-tellings. She would sit with her cheek resting on her hand, watching the flames, and seeing in them pictures which her great-grandmother's words painted. She, too, often longed for a life of adventure. Now that she had cut herself off from her books and intercourse with Peter--she saw him as little as was compatible with their relationship--now that she had clipped her own wings, she found life stale, lacking in all enterprise and interest. She would not allow herself to meditate upon the past. She swept her mind clear of it, no regrets, no longings, no phantoms or shadows must find a lodging there. But an individuality such as hers could not become thus permanently dwarfed. She might clip her own wings, but they would grow again, and bear her upwards to cleave other air, and find other climes than those to which she had been borne away in the past. Through the grey winter days and the wild winter nights, she flung a part of herself to the winds, and as it fluttered upon the blast like an autumn leaf, she thought of the trees in Cringel Forest, and pitied their nakedness. But they would grow green again, and spread their glory to the summer. So, perhaps for her, there would come a renewal, and her soul would blossom like the may--nay--not like the may, sweet and beautiful as it was, but like the corn of wheat, which unless it fall into the ground and die, cannot bring forth fruit. She felt compassionate towards the wheat which went so patiently into the tomb, and came forth, like a shriven almoner of old, to give itself without reserve to the service of others.