Now he centred upon her and again thin shadows crept through his mind. For good or evil they had listened to their own hearts alone; but he still found questions asking themselves and doubts limning deep in his soul when he thought of her; he still felt a smoulder of indignation in himself that this cup should be forced upon them. There was an ingredient of bitterness, a dumb question why fate should have called him and Dinah to do a thing against which he rebelled, and the doing of which was an outrage upon her love of truth and directness. She might make light of the burden, but he resented the fact that she was called to bear it. Such is the force of inherited conviction and tradition that he could not, as she had done, discredit and dismiss his past as an empty dream. She honestly so regarded Maynard's story; otherwise he knew she would never have come to him; but it was only for his sake that she made the sacrifice, and he felt it a cruel fact that any sacrifice should be called for from her. His past was real enough, and the shadow must fall on her and the children to be born of her. That the world would never see the shadow, or know of its existence, did not matter. For him and his wife it could never vanish. Even yet he did not perceive that no shadow whatever existed for Dinah. The thing that still haunted him like a fog, like the robe of the east wind hanging on the skirts of the moor, must, he felt, be appreciated by her also, and might, indeed, grow more solid and real for her in the future. Regret for the inevitable thus found a place in his mind despite his reason, because it sprang from foundations other than his reason. Swinging forward with an ash sapling in his right hand and a leathern portmanteau in his left, Lawrence presently saw his goal ahead. Sunshine played over the blue hazes and touched the grey summit of Shepherd's Cross, where the ancient stone stood erect and solitary on the heath. It reared not far distant from rough, broken ground, where Tudor miners had streamed the hillside for tin in Elizabethan days. The relic glimmered with lichens, black and gold and ash colour. Upon its shaft stuck red hairs, where roaming cattle had rubbed themselves. It stood the height of a tall man above the water worn trough at its foot, and the cross was still perfect, with its short, squat arms unbroken, though weathered in all its chamfering by centuries of storm. Here he sat down, knit his brows to scan the northern slope of the hill, whereon Dinah must presently appear, and wondered how far she might have already tramped upon her way. He had found his own climb from Holne shorter than he imagined and was at their place of meeting before the time.