He halted now at the gate where Peggy had kissed him for the last time. He looked at the sun, set high in a sky of blue that had no soul behind it--a sky as hard as beaten metal that seemed to press upon the earth and keep in the suffocating heat. If ever a man prayed for rain, Gaunt prayed for it now with a whole heart. He sought for one wisp of cloud to break the fierce monotony of blue; there was none. Each undulation of the hill-tops showed strangely clear, as if cut by a keen-edged knife. The silence was unbearable. Gaunt’s courage, when he chose to enter Ghyll and share its dangers, was child’s play to the pluck that now was asked of him. There was no longer any warmth of impulse, of zest in sacrifice for its own fine sake; fear had reached him, and the shelterless heat weakened every effort at resistance, till there were times when dread merged into outright panic and set him trembling like a child. He would recover, win back his manhood with the dogged perseverance that had won him the fell-race; then, and not before, he would seek out the widow, and day by day she found him stronger, more considerate, more bent on naming her “mother” and on proving himself a real son. This morning, as he leaned over the gate and searched for rain-clouds, he went through one of these battles with despair. When it was nearly ended, and the colour was returning to his face, the doctor’s big, fiddle-head nag came up the slope, and Gaunt started when the rider’s voice broke the silence. “What news, Mr. Gaunt?” he asked, reining in and giving Reuben a quick, professional glance. “No news,” Gaunt answered, with a touch of dry humour. “We’re penned like birds in a cage, doctor, and have nothing to listen to, save this cursed stillness. If you could give us a promise of rain, now--” “Well, I can help you there,” put in the other briskly. “I ought to have learned something from the weather by this time, for I’ve been plagued enough by it. The hot spell is nearly done with; and now you may call me a fool for prophesying in face of such a sky as that.” It was curious to see how eagerly Reuben caught at the hope. This conspiracy of sun and stark, blue sky against him had grown to be in sober fact a menace; a few more days of the strain, and fear might give an easy inroad to the fever. “There’s not a sign of it,” he said, anxious to have his word disproved. “Wait till you’ve had twenty years more of this queer climate, Mr. Gaunt, and then you may be just beginning to know it. I’ve seen a dozen little signs of rain as I came up the moor, but I trust more to what old Lamach of High Farm calls a feeling in his bones.” Gaunt remembered the doctor’s reputation as a weather seer. “I hope to God you’re in the right, doctor.”