There was not a breath of wind, the air was keen with frost, there was not a living thing in sight, save in the sky, far up, under the cold grey clouds, a hawk poised, now moving with a flutter of the wings, now motionless as a stone. One might stand here seemingly unseen; it would have appeared that one might commit any act, unseen by eye, save the eye of God. Yet far up the fell, so small a figure as to be unnoticeable, a boy, Robert Lewthwaite, son of a shoe-maker in Blencarn, attracted by the hum of the approaching car on the high road far below, was watching. From that elevation he could see the car approaching; he saw it stop and the occupant get out. He recognized him at once as Sir Anthony Gyde. He saw him cross the field and enter the little valley. Here Sir Anthony looked around him, sweeping the fell face as though to see if he were observed. Apparently satisfied, he knocked at the cottage door; the door was opened for him, he entered, and the door was closed. All this vastly interested the boy. Klein, the German artist, had greatly exercised the local mind. A man whose face and personality would have drawn attention in a city, excited the deepest interest among these primitive folk. Primitive, perhaps, but full of imagination, and more than ordinarily speculative. He, too, like Sir Anthony Gyde, had been labelled a stracklin; besides being a stracklin he was “Waugh.” No boy in the village would have approached Skirle Cottage after dark. There was something about its occupant that fascinated them, but it was a fascination composed three parts of fear. He cooked his own food, and though the food he cooked was the food he bought from the village shop and the surrounding farms, there were sinister suspicions in the minds of the young people in the neighbourhood that he cooked and ate other things besides eggs and bacon and fell mutton. An old woman of the village, Mrs Braithwaite, called every day at noon to clean up the place and make the bed (Klein was a late riser, another suspicious point about him), and her tales about the artist and his doings did not detract from the villagers’ pre-conceived impressions. She declared, at times, that he was enough to “mak’ t’ flesh creep up yan’s back to think on,” but he paid her five shillings a week, and as money was scarce in the Braithwaite household, and the work to be done at Skirle Cottage occupied only half an hour or so a day, she kept on with the job. There was, besides the money, a sort of eerie fascination about the stranger that was not entirely distasteful to the old lady’s heart.