But this boast was more easy to make than to fulfil, for everywhere hung, poised in air, something like a silvery veil, shutting out from sight all familiar landmarks, and rendering it impossible to distinguish any object two paces distant. The mist had fallen so abruptly from the huge Tors, as it seemed, that rose here and there like watch-towers of the waste, that a fanciful imagination might have conceived the seething vapour to represent a semi-transparent drapery, suddenly cast from a giant hand over land and sea. But a minute or two before, Ethel had allowed her eyes to rest admiringly on the many-coloured surface of the vast moor, here robed in purple of imperial splendour, there of tenderest green, and anon brown or crimson or bluish gray, as shrub and berry and weed and wild-flower dappled the rolling ocean of heather. Then below was the cultured plain, furrowed by thickly wooded clefts, through which the Dartmoor streams ran brawling to the sea, that lay calm and blue and flecked with white sails, so plainly within the range of vision. And now all was changed, and it was fog, fog, and fog only, girdling in the wayfarers on every hand, and there was no knowing whither to turn. Betty Mudge did her best; but her zeal outran her discretion; and indeed the task of pilot in that rolling mist was no easy one. Had there but been a hard road, though never so narrow, beneath her feet, the girl would have gone on cheerfully enough. But there was no real road for about half the distance between High Tor and Shaws, as that solitary spot where stood the abode of the Mudges was called, merely a congeries of winding cart-ruts, among which, in moderately clear weather, it was facile for one who knew the country to make short-cuts at pleasure. ‘If we were to go back?’ suggested Ethel, after a while; but Betty Mudge by no means accepted the proposition. ‘It be just as easy, miss, to go forrard as to go backarder,’ returned Lenny’s sister doggedly; ‘but what’s main hard in the thick is to know which is which.’ They went on for some time without speaking. ‘I was listening,’ at last said the young guide abruptly, ‘for a sheep-bell. If I could but hear that, shepherd would put us right.’ But though Ethel hearkened also, in hopes of catching the far-off tinkle of a bell from some folded flock, the silence remained as unbroken as though man, with all his works and ways, had been banished from the island. Nothing but blinding mist to greet the eye, nothing but heather and peat and stones beneath the feet, as the two stumbled and groped forward, going deeper and deeper, for aught they knew, into the heart of the wilderness. The misty vapour heaved and rolled like a billowy sea, taking fantastic shapes, here of a threatening giant, there of a winding-sheet spread by no mortal hand, there again of a battlemented castle rearing its towers aloft.