Gaunt seldom probed into other folks’ motives, or his own; and he did not know that there was more behind this roundabout journey to Good Intent than was explained either by mistrust of his welcome, or by liking for a long ride up the open lands. His project was so dimly formed that, even when he reached the moor, he turned again to the left, and not along the right-hand track that led him to Hirst’s farm. He crossed the stream that, just below, ran brown and sparkling into the walled pool used in time of sheep-washing. The track now was only a narrow, lumpy lane, winding between sloping moor above and sharply falling moor beneath, such as was plied in October by the bracken-sledges. Presently it narrowed again into a foot-trail of the sheep; but Gaunt, keeping his eyes on the pitfalls by the way, went forward and up towards the waving line of grey-black which marked the topmost ridge of heath. His cob moved daintily, not liking the rude menace of the ground, until at last they gained the higher lands, went quietly over a level stretch of peat, and halted at the edge of Water Ghyll. He looked down upon the steep descent--rocks, and heather-clumps, and tufts of fern new-greening in among the rusty last year’s fronds--then glanced across at Clifford’s Peel, where its battered remnants stood four-square still to the winds, and prated of old days when the Scotch came raiding sheep and cattle from off the pastured slopes of Garth. It was here that Cilla and he had wandered as boy and girl, here that they had sought great mysteries in among the beetling rocks, the rowans, the deep, thick clumps of ling and cranberry. Water Ghyll had been a forbidden, happy land to them in those days, and they had always reached Garth again with tired feet and glowing cheeks, feeling that they had come safely through hazardous adventures, and trusting soon to tempt again the frowns of peril. Gaunt thought tenderly of Cilla, as he recalled those far-off scampers. Wisdom in action came harder to him always than tenderness of thought; and by that token more women’s tears had been shed on his account than he deserved. He had won her at long last, he told himself; and this wild trough of the moors, filled all with peat and rocks and silver music of the stream below, seemed to hold some special greeting for him. As he looked about him, and across the Ghyll, and down into the haunted streamway, his horse began to fidget, then reared suddenly. “What’s amiss, old lad?” laughed Reuben, all but unseated. “Was in a brown study, I, and thou’st spoilt it all.” A moment later a woman, climbing the steep face of the Ghyll, showed her head above the ling. Gaunt had been too lost in his own dreams to hear the rattle of loose stones that witnessed to her climb, though his horse had not. The woman’s face was beaten hard by toil and weather, yet she carried it straight on her broad shoulders. “Ay, ye, Reuben Gaunt?” she said, without surprise.