They walked across to the farmhouse in silence, one behind the other. Not even the young fellow raised his eyes to the window and the girl framed within it. Behind them came a gust of piercing easterly wind. A cloud had covered the sun. The squalid farmyard, the bare fell-side beyond it, the distant levels of the marsh, had taken to themselves a cold forbidding air. Laura again imagined it in December--a waste of snow, with the farm making an ugly spot upon the white, and the little black-bearded sheep she could see feeding on the fell, crowding under the rocks for shelter. But this time she shivered. All the spell was broken. To live up here with this madwoman, this strange youth--and Polly! Yet it seemed to her that something drew her to Cousin Elizabeth--if she were not so mad. How strange to find this abhorrence of Mr. Helbeck among these people--so different, so remote! She remembered her own words--"I am sure I _shall_ hate him!"--not without a stab of conscience. What had she been doing--perhaps--but adding her own injustice to theirs? She stood lost in a young puzzle and heat of feeling--half angry, half repentant. But only for a second. Then certain phrases of Augustina's rang through her mind--she saw herself standing in the corner of the chapel while the others prayed. Every pulse tightened--her whole nature leapt again in defiance. She seemed to be holding something at bay--a tyrannous power that threatened humiliation and hypocrisy, that seemed at the same time to be prying into secret things--things it should never, never know--and never rule! Yes, she did understand Cousin Elizabeth--she _did_! * * * * * The dinner went sadly. The viands were heavy: so were the faces of the labourers, and the air of the low-raftered kitchen, heated as it was by a huge fire, and pervaded by the smell from the farmyard. Laura felt it all very strange, the presence of the farm servants at the same table with the Masons and herself--the long silences that no one made an effort to break--the relations between Hubert and his mother. As for the labourers, Mason addressed them now and then in a bullying voice, and they spoke to him as little as they could. It seemed to Laura that there was an alliance between them and the mother against a lazy and incompetent master; and that the lad's vanity was perpetually alive to it. Again and again he would pull himself together, attempt the gentleman, and devote himself to his young lady guest. But in the midst of their conversation he would hear something at the other end of the table, and suddenly there would come a burst of fierce unintelligible speech between him and the mistress of the house, while the labourers sat silent and sly, and Polly's loud laugh would break in, trying to make peace.