She left him abruptly to have her cry out indoors and get done with it. Gaunt watched her out of sight, then turned the shoulder of the farmstead and made his way, not down but up the moor. The track to Peggy’s grave was marked plainly by Widow Mathewson’s big, manlike boots. There was something strangely sad and lonely in this path of sorrow, in the look of the regular, deep footprints, limned sharply, even to the impress of the nails, by the bitter, east wind frost. There was something lonelier still in the look of the glen above, which now lay almost level with the moor. The upper branches of the rowan were all that broke the white, unending spaces, reaching out to a grey-black sky that showed dirty by contrast with the virgin white beneath. Gaunt understood how hard it was to believe the country saying that “snow covers warm.” An incongruous memory came to him of the evening, little more than four months ago, when Peggy and he had crossed from Linsall Fair, and had been glad of the rowan’s shelter, the cool tinkle-tankle of the stream, after the parched heat of the uplands. He saw the girl’s look of splendid vigour and high spirits, the light in her eyes, as he stooped to kiss her and she reached up her lips with reckless zest in life and laughed: “Yes, Reuben, with a will and a half, if only because you won the fell-race to-day.” He could see the red scarf at her breast, setting off, as she knew well enough, her gipsy beauty. He could feel his heart beat with eagerness as he asked her to marry him, thinking, in the moment’s overmastering passion, that he could be faithful to any but Priscilla of the Good Intent. And this was the end of it all. The stream frozen down to the pebbles that lined its bed; three feet of snow lay over the spot where they had kissed in the cool of a summer’s evening; and Peggy--Peggy, with her gipsy eyes, and her flaunting, crimson scarf and her wild, unstinting love for him--lay under a shroud of the moor’s making. There comes an end to a man’s power to feel further grief, at these times of martyrdom self-imposed. The wise God has seen to that. Reuben turned at last, his shoulders bent, and went down the track which Peggy’s mother had made for him. Then he made his way home, as he had come, along the wall-tops, or across the higher spits of land which the wind had cleared, or by any way that served. His housekeeper, when he came into the house at dusk, said to herself that he looked like a broken man, and wondered at the cause.