Asenath Lear was neither a pretty woman nor a particularly young one, but having in the first instance embraced spinsterhood voluntarily, she was cheerfully resigned to its enforced continuance. All the world knew she had been "asked" by Samuel Harvey of the Upper Farm, and though all the world considered her a fool for refusing him, it still could not throw in her face the taunt that she had never had a chance. She had said no to Samuel because at that time she was young enough--being but twenty--to nurse vague yearnings for something more romantic than the stolid Sam, but the years fled taking with them the bloom that had been her only beauty, and romance never showed so much as the tip of a wing-feather. "I'm doubtful but that you were plum foolish to send Sam'l Harvey to another woman's arms, Senath," her mother told her once, "but there, I never was one for driving a maid. There's a chance yet; ef you'll look around you'll see 'tes the plain-featured women as has the husbands." "'Tes because the pretty ones wouldn't have en, I fear," said Senath on a gleam of truth, but with a very contented laugh, "men's a pack of trouble in the flesh. I would ha' wed sure 'nough ef et hadn' been that when you get to knaw a man you see him as somethen' so different from your thought of him." "Eh, you and your thoughts . . ." cried the petulant old mother, quoting better than she knew, "they'll have to be your man and your childer, too." Senath, the idealist, was well content that it should be so, and when her mother's death left her her own mistress, she went to live in a tiny cottage up on the moors with no companions but those thoughts--the thoughts at once crude and vague, but strangely penetrating--of an untaught mind whose natural vigour has been neither guided nor cramped by education. Her cottage, that stood four-square in the eye of the wind, was set where the moorland began, some few fields away from the high road. At the back was the tiny garden where Senath coaxed some potatoes and beans from out the grudging earth; and two apple trees, in an ecstasy of contortion, supported the clothes-line from which great sheets, golden-white in the sun, bellied like sails, or enigmatic garments of faded pinks and blues proclaimed the fact that Senath "took in washing." On the moor in front of the cottage stood nineteen stones, breast-high, set in a huge circle. Within this circle the grass, for some reason, was of a more vivid green than on the rest of the moor, and against it the stones on the nearer curve showed a pale grey, while the further ones stood up dark against the sky, for beyond them the moor sloped slightly to the cliffs and the sea.