"Don't I do well? Will Peter think I have not improved?" He patted her shoulder. "You do very well indeed. I'm proud of you." Her brow flushed with pleasure and she rose, dwarfing and bedimming the little man with her large frame and golden head. "To-morrow you'll come to me at the cottage," he said. She nodded, and they parted, he going down the dale, and she, leaping like a deer up the fellside, to the sheep pastures high upon Thundergay. She paused on a rocky point and looked back. Below her lay Swirtle Tarn, and far, far off the shining waters of the great mere. She could see Greystones, no bigger than a pebble, lying under the cliffs, and the trees of Cringel Forest like a bundle of green wool fallen down between a split in the hills. Troy, and the battle-field, and the long black boats had vanished; but the land was mysterious with the epic of her own life. She did not ask herself the reason for this emergence of her spirit into fuller existence. But she was aware of a veil which had been drawn over the arduous toils of the day, and the unveiling of beautiful things that made a new setting to her mind. Peter Fleming was coming back. She often thought of Peter, and wondered what changes he would bring to the lonely life of the fells. But her imagination was nebulous; it pictured nothing concrete; she was content to let her mind hover round the sun-glistening vapour and leave the realisation for the unfolding of time. * * * * * Surprise, which gave rise to many wild rumours in the dale, had greeted the announcement that Peter Fleming was going to keep school. No one could think of an adequate reason for such a descent from the pinnacle of learning where he stood. Anyone could keep school, but few had the opportunity or ability to become a bishop. Dusty John said little, but Peter's mother lost her disappointment at the turn of affairs in having the school-room cleaned for her son, in seeing the moss scraped from the doorstep, and in herself hanging curtains in all the windows. Peter would live at home, and sleep in his attic under the mill-house roof, but the school-parlour was to be his study. There he could have silence, his books, and grow wise. The village school of High Fold was a little stone building standing just within the fringe of Cringel Forest. The road ran by it, and the trees crowded so closely around, that they seemed to jostle each other in their eagerness to peer through the doors and windows. A kitchen, bed-chamber and parlour, and a long room fitted with desks and benches made up the interior, the walls of which were plastered and white-washed, and patterned by the ever-moving shadows of the encroaching trees. There the rustle of leaves was never silent. A cobbled path led from road to threshold. Just now, in the late summer, it was bordered on either side by a rank growth of hemlock.