The entrance to this house would be for Farquharson the threshold of his career; surely he could not pass along the lovely lanes which led to it hedges festooned with wild blossom, unmoved. Rising, always rising, the way was one of pleasant scents and sounds, its foliage brilliant with the stir of butterflies, and spring’s caress. Past deep gorges, and ever winding circuitously up the hill, it opened out at length upon the moor. Evelyn wondered if Farquharson, too, would feel its power, to her as magnetic as that of the Karroo of South Africa, which most people call barren and desolate. Evelyn had given herself up to the Karroo; its immensity, its pathos, had flooded her soul and left traces which would never be washed away. Its wide spaces and streaks of crude colour, the lines of hills in the distance, now curved and rounded as delicately as a woman’s breast, now straight and slim, like an index finger pointing to the sky, the peace and awe broken at intervals by a flight of ostriches from a tiny farm, or by the figure of a solitary rider abruptly outlined against the strong yellows and browns and purples and greens which blossomed for such eyes as could distinguish them—all touched her infinitely. She felt as if God’s Voice must penetrate the silence, and that to hear the Voice was to obey. But where the Karroo had calmed, Dartmoor always frightened her. She loved Creagh itself, but the moor which one must cross to come to it was surely, as a whole, more cruel than peaceful. It wantonly played with men and women whom it bred, who looked to it for protection. Its bogs had buried little harmless children; it cheated and deceived prisoners trying to escape in the fog, walking round and round in ever-widening circles, only to fall at last, starved and exhausted, to find a cordon of warders drawn about them, and the prison walls in view. She wondered if Farquharson would leave it as gladly as she had done for the valley, to which they must presently descend again. Creagh itself lay low; one came upon it through one of the finest fir plantations in England. There was a natural opening in the hills beyond, and within sight of the study window the little ribbon of water widened to the sea, and was itself lost in the greater power, an augury of life. "Up to the hills, down to the valley, and then Eternity," thought Evelyn. Creagh, Farquharson and Calvert stood talking together at the open door for a moment or two more before entering. Calvert’s brow was riddled with lines; one would have called him a stern man until his face lit up and became transfigured at some casual remark of Farquharson’s. This was a man who had worked hard for his money, you could see; if life had brought him much, it exacted full payment for its every gift.