Her mother had said that before any undertaking you should work the Harper charm. The book directed that on a lonely hill, you must listen with your eyes shut for the fairy playing. If the undertaking was good you would hear, coming from very far away, a sound of harping. Silver folk with golden harps, so the book said, keep on a purple hill somewhere beyond seeing, and there they play the moon up and the moon down. And at sun-up they cry for those that have not heard them. If you hear them ever so faintly, you can go on to the end of your undertaking, and there'll be no tears in it. But you must never tire of waiting, nor tell anyone what you have heard. The next night Hazel stole out in the heavy dew to a hummock of the mountain, and sat down there to wait for moonrise. But when the moon came--the thinnest of silver half-hoops, very faint in the reflected rose from the west--there was no sound except the song of the wood-larks. They persevered, although the sun was gone. Soon they, too, were hushed, and Hazel was folded in silence. She waited a long while. The chapel and the minister's house sank into the deepening night as into water. The longer the omen tarried, the more she wanted it to come. Then fatalism reasserted itself, and she relapsed into her usual state of mind. 'I dunna care,' she said. 'It inna no use to tarry. They unna play. I'll bide along of Ed'ard at chapel on Sunday, and sing higher than last time.' She turned home. At that moment a note of music, strayed, it seemed, out of space, wandered across the hill-top. Then a few more, thin and silvery, ran down the silence like a spray of water. The air was lost in distance, but the notes were undoubtedly those of a harp. 'It's them!' whispered Hazel. 'I'm bound to go.' Then she remembered her mother's injunctions, and took to her heels. At home in her quiet room, she thought of the strange shining folk playing on their purple mountain. She never knew that the harper was her father returning by devious roads from one of the many festivals at which he played in summer-time, and having frequent rests by the way, owing to the good ale he had drunk. Her bright galaxy of faery was only a drunken man. Her fate had been settled by a passing whim of his, but so had been her coming into the world. When she went in, Edward was sitting up for her, anxious, but trying to reason himself into calm, as Hazel was given to roaming. 'Where have you been?' he asked rather sternly, for he had suffered many things from anxiety and from his mother. 'Only up to'erts the pool, Ed'ard.' 'Don't go there again.' 'Canna I go walking on the green hill by my lonesome?' 'No. You can go in the woods. They're safe enough.' 'Foxy's a bad dog!' came Mrs. Marston's voice from upstairs. 'She bit the rope and took the mutton!' 'Eh, I'm main sorry!' cried Hazel. 'But she inna a bad dog, Mrs. Marston; she's a good fox.'