A heavy storm was mounting up behind the Cathedral, black clouds being piled tier on tier as though some gigantic shopman were shooting out rolls of carpet for the benefit of some celestial purchaser. The Cathedral shone in the last flash of the fleeing light with a strange phantasmal silver sheen; once more it was a ship sailing high before the tempest. Down by the river the dusk was grey and sodden. The river, flowing sullenly, was a lighter dark between the line of houses and the bending fields. The air was so heavy that men seemed to walk with bending backs as though the burden was more than they could sustain. This section of the river had become now to Falk something that was part of himself. The old mill, the group of trees beside it, the low dam over which the water fell with its own peculiar drunken gurgle, the pathway with its gritty stony surface, so that it seemed to grind its teeth in protest at every step that you took, on the left the town piled high behind you with the Cathedral winged and dominant and supreme, the cool sloping fields beyond the river, the dark bend of the wood cutting the horizon--these things were his history and he was theirs. There were many other places to which they might have gone, other times that they might have chosen, but circumstances and accident had found for them always this same background. He had long ago ceased to consider whether any one was watching them or talking about them. They were, neither of them, cowards, although to Annie her father was a figure of sinister power and evil desire. She hated her father, believed him capable of infinite wickedness, but did not fear him enough to hesitate to face him. Nevertheless, it was from him that she was chiefly escaping, and she gave to Falk a curious consciousness of the depths of malice and vice that lay hidden behind that smiling face, in the secret places of that fat jolly body. Falk was certain now that Hogg knew of their meetings; he suspected that he had known of them from the first. Hogg had his faults but they did not frighten Falk, who was, indeed, afraid of no man alive save only himself. The other element in the affair that increased as the week passed was Falk's consciousness of the strange spirit of nobility that there was in Annie. Although she stirred him so deeply she did not blind him as to her character. He saw her exactly for what she was--uneducated, ignorant, limited in all her outlook, common in many ways, sometimes surly, often superstitious; but through all these things that strain of nobility ran, showing itself in many unexpected places, calling to him like an echo from some high, far-distant source. Because of it he was beginning to wonder whether after all the alliance that was beginning to spring up between them might not be something more permanent and durable than at first he had ever supposed it could be. He was beginning to wonder whether he had not been fortunate far beyond his deserts....