The three miles ‘and a piece’ proved exceedingly like the ‘mile and a bittock’ of story. That is, the three miles were presently accomplished, but the ‘piece’ stretched far before them, and the light was no longer so clear as it had been. Moreover, the wary peasant’s prophecy was being fulfilled with a startling promptness. The wind had already shifted, and was blowing from the north, almost in her face, keen and piercing. Every cloud had disappeared, and the sky was of a crystalline clearness, ominous of coming frost; and still Catcastle Crag—though they could see what Eleanor imagined must be that remarkable eminence—grew no nearer. They seemed to have got round it, and it still kept provokingly to their left, with the road, and several fields, and a thicket between them and it. ‘I suppose,’ said Eleanor within herself, ‘that they call this part of the road a “piece,” because they have no numbers with which to count its length in miles.’ She had grown thoughtful. Dusk had fallen over her high spirits, as well as over the landscape. At length she called William, and said she thought they had better leave the crag and keep to the homeward road, a proposition to which he yielded a cheerful assent, and fell back into his place. Eleanor rode on; she supposed they were on the right road, but it wound on and on without seeming to lead to anywhere in particular. She was sure, from what she remembered of the map, that they ought to be at Deepdale before now. Deepdale, she knew, was a wood. But here was no sign of any wood to be seen. The road was a bare, bleak road, with a rough stone wall on either side, a road which must have been dreary and monotonous at any season; but which now, in the grim November evening, with the dusk rapidly falling—not a sound to be heard but the faint piping of a bitter wind from the black wall of fells to the north; not a sight to be seen save the bare fields on either side, and at a little distance a clump of trees—was melancholy in the extreme; and Eleanor, looking at the frowning escarpments to the left, no longer felt that her listed to ‘Climb Catcastle’s giddy crag,’ as, before setting off, she had fondly hoped to do ere her return. She was of a nature at once poetical and highly imaginative, and for all the hard, stony prose of the road, there was something attractive to her in the very bleakness and chillness of it;—that faintly moaning wind seemed to whisper that it came from the north, that it had its cradle in the ultimate Thule, where its breath was more piercing even than here. She felt all the force of the contrast to this scene which was presented by the sudden appearance of a light gleaming out of the clump of trees before spoken of. ‘Oh,’ she said, quickly, ‘there must be a house behind those trees—some place, at any rate, where we can ask if we are in the right road to Bradstane.’