Auna, running riotously high above her summer bed, hung dead sticks and withered foliage on inundated branch and bough, to mark her progress and leave a signal of her autumn frolic. She shouted, wild as a mænad, and leapt from rock to rock, swirling here, flinging wide, glassy billows there, and submerging each familiar stock and stone along her banks. The height of the freshet was over and the river had already fallen a foot from her torrent of the day before. Now sunshine filled the valley, while the fires of the fall flashed on oak and beech and the last of the rowan berries. On Shipley Bridge sat a man smoking and waiting to keep an appointment. He was to meet Benny Veale from the warrens, and beside him, in a limp heap of grey and white fur, lay a dozen dead rabbits. Adam Winter, the new tenant of Shipley Farm, was a man of thirty with a fair, commonplace face. He stood only five feet eight, but was well built and strongly put together. He wore a small moustache and a little patch of sandy whisker before each ear. His pale blue eyes were kindly, the expression of his face amiable, easy and rather wistful. He had failed at Brent and lost half his capital, an inheritance from his dead father; and now he was trying his luck again on a smaller place, with the moorman's privileges of turbary and grazing. A maiden aunt kept house for him, and his right hand was an elder brother, Samuel Winter, a man weak-minded and lacking in self-control, yet resolute to work, happy in solitude and not difficult to manage. Adam had made a start and being of a temperate and reflective nature in most affairs of life, faced the future without fear. He was not ambitious, or concerned to do much more than keep his aunt and brother and himself in solvency. Five years earlier he had been in love in a tepid fashion, but his romance came to nothing and its failure left him cast down for a short while only. He soon recovered, but revived no ambition to wed. Here, then, he lingered with the sun on his back, appreciated the gentle warmth, smoked his pipe, listened to the thunder of the river in the gorge beneath him and perceived that the granite bridge vibrated to its rough challenge.