Then he looked round to see if there was anything else that he could honestly take. Yes--an ash stick he had cut himself a week or two ago. Nothing else--and there was Tibby moving and beginning to bark in the cowhouse. He ran across the road, and from a safe shelter in the fields on the farther side he again looked back to the farm. There was Louie's room, the blind still down. He thought of his blow of the night before--of his promises to her. Aye, she would fret over his going--he knew that--in her own wild way. She would think he had been a beast to her. So he had--so he had! There surged up in his mind inarticulate phrases of remorse, of self-excuse, as though he were talking to her. Some day he would come back and claim her. But when? His buoyant self-dependence was all gone. It had nothing to do with his present departure. That came simply from the fact that it was _impossible_ for him to go on living in Kinder any longer--he did not stop to analyse the whys and wherefores. But suddenly a nervous horror of seeing anyone he knew, now that the morning was advancing, startled him from his hiding-place. He ran up towards the Scout again, so as to make a long circuit round the Wigsons' farm. As he distinguished the walls of it a shiver of passion ran through the young body. Then he struck off straight across the moors towards Glossop. One moment he stood on the top of Mardale Moor. On one side of him was the Kinder valley, Needham Farm still showing among its trees; the white cataract of the Downfall cleaving the dark wall of the Scout, and calling to the runaway in that voice of storm he knew so well; the Mermaid's Pool gleaming like an eye in the moorland. On the other side were hollow after hollow, town beyond town, each with its cap of morning smoke. There was New Mills, there was Stockport, there in the far distance was Manchester. The boy stood a moment poised between the two worlds, his ash-stick in his hand, the old coat wound round his arm. Then at a bound he cleared a low stone wall beside him and ran down the Glossop road.