Catherine sat on by the fire, so tired that the silence fallen on the house with the shutting of Susannah's window was a relief. She was aching, and her limbs felt the strain of that gallop along the edge of the hill. Surely there never was a woman so hard driven by the caprices of contrary winds as she; never a bride who was to watch the dawning of her expected wedding-day in such an untoward plight. Above her head enmity--there was small doubt of that--and now Heber was miles away. He had appeared, only to drag her from the beaten path to the altar and to disappear again, leaving her stranded. Though, even now, she did not actually regret Saunders, her soul was overwhelmed by the things she had heard about the shepherd before the breaking of her troth with him. People had called him "a wild man," shaking their heads, but she had never been able to reconcile the accusation with his strict principles and religious zeal. Out of chapel and in it he was not the same man, though no one had yet made any definite allegation against him. Labels play a large part in the imagination of youth and she was young enough to be desperately impressed by discrepancies and contradictions. Her association with him had been short, and ran smoothly till its breaking, but she had learnt little about men from it. Until their quiet courtship had begun, her lot had been entirely with women. Her mistress had not given her much latitude, and Heber had been seldom to the farm; their walks to and from Pencoed chapel on Sundays had been almost the only meetings of the engaged pair. The man who had dismounted at the door of Mrs. Job's barn and whirled her, terrified, through the starlight, could not have existed in those untroubled Sabbaths. He could not be the same person as the Heber she had known. She did not suspect that, though he had always existed, she had never seen him. A like puzzle had dismayed her in Saunders; the same chameleon-like habit of turning, under new circumstances, into a different being. Her simple philosophy and experience had given her nothing with which to meet these problems. She had sat some time when there was a movement above and a step came quietly down the stairs. Catherine straightened herself, her eyes dilating as Susannah entered. She carried no light, but the intermittent flame in the grate played on her, alternately hiding and revealing her face. She sat down at the table, leaning her elbow on it, and her companion did not need the sudden illumination starting from the fire to make her aware of her expression. "I've heard about you," said Susannah. Catherine turned away her head. It seemed to her that her best refuge was in silence. "There's not much Heber hides from me," continued the other; "it isn't for nothing he comes back to his father's house time and again as he do. He's reckoned a good son, is Heber." The sly scorn of her laugh ran like an electric current through the kitchen.