The sun had passed behind the mountains and Nancy shivered. Inman drew her arm within his own and moved forward up the hill, and she made no protest, realising in a dull half-conscious way that her future had been determined for her. The next morning she left the village and went to stay with her uncle. CHAPTER X IN WHICH THE COMPANY AT THE “PACKHORSE” IS INVITED TO DRINK A HEALTH CHRISTMAS! The weather that ushered in the festive season was false to all the hoary traditions of crisp air and powdery snow, and could hardly have behaved more churlishly. When the sun turned away its red face from the melancholy scene at the Cove on that fateful Saturday afternoon in early December, it showed itself no more for a whole fortnight. The thin haze, which had been beautiful as gossamer when the noon-day sun shone through it, and resplendent as samite when the fingers of dying day embroidered it with gold, became a clammy mist, cold as the touch of death, that found the crevices in the human frame where aches and pains lay dormant and stirred them to activity. Old Cawden, shirted and night-capped, hid his great bulk from sight. Vapours rose like water-sprites from the stream and mingled with the cloud overhead. Robin and starling sat—who knows how miserably?—in their nests, and left crabbed winter to its mood of peevish silence. On Christmas Eve a Viking’s wind, the “black-north-easter,” awoke in the caverns of the Pennines, and went out to sweep the mists from the moors with his broom of sleet, and right well he did his work. All through the hours of Christmas Day he carried on, and with such fierce zeal that hailstones danced in the streets of Mawm almost without cessation, like goblins set free by some Lord of Misrule to celebrate their Saturnalia! Shades of Charles Dickens! There was little enough of his genial spirit upon the moors that Christmastide! Conditions improved a little on Boxing Day, and the wind that blustered up the valley from the south, and barked at the heels of the black-north-easter, was kindlier and more playful. Patches of blue appeared among the clouds. The sun opened a sleepy eye at intervals and smiled on the grey old village, as much as to say that this game of hide-and-seek would not last for ever; and when evening fell the stars came out and studded a blue-black sky from horizon to horizon, with not a single cloud to dim the lustre of any one of them.