They had not thought, when they came back to Marbeck at the turn of the year, that Marbeck could be better than before. They came hoping, they said, to recapture the old emotions, and brought Anne with them to show her their fairyland. They did not recapture the old emotions, because they were young emotions, a ferment like youth itself, and things were settled now. They seemed to look back from their equable security to a wild infancy of their emotion, a fumbling, frenzied, awkward age of love. Of course they looked back happily, from a place where things were happy and serene to one where things were happy and impetuous. The Dale was full of wonder, with a wonder which now belonged unerringly to fact and had mellowed in reality. For Anne, it was a pretty place, but “lonesome,” and, amazingly to them, she chafed to leave it. Anne did not suffer holidays gladly. They had extolled Anne, they had not thought it credible that she should fail at anything, and it ruffled them disturbingly to find her fail at this. They had planned eagerly and, indeed, generously to bring her with them to Marbeck--generously, because they wanted to be alone, and even Anne, owe her what they did and be she what she might, was an intruder. But they wanted her to share with them their wonderland. Marbeck was theirs, theirs intimately and alone, their holy place, and they could think of nothing finer, nothing which came more nearly to her deserts of them, than to initiate her to their secret worship. They made her free of Marbeck, relived their week for her as much as for themselves, showed her where this and that dear folly happened, took her to view-points whence she could see the tops of hills they climbed, using the landscape as the ground-plan of an ecstasy which they invited her to share, and were discomposed to find that Anne, plainly straining enthusiasm in their behalf, could only say of Marbeck, their Marbeck, “I’m sure it’s very nice.” She damned with faint praise their enchanted valley in whose every tree they took by now as fierce a joy as if they had created it, and in despair they dragged her, as a last hope, to the very Holy of their holies, the top of Hartle Pike. If she failed them there, if she did not see the beauty and the grace, the penetrating significance and the absolute sanctity of Hartle Pike, then her greatness was lopsided, resulting, like a show chrysanthemum, from the atrophy of other possibilities. It was a great day for the fells, when a frozen surface crushed elastically underfoot and kept one dryshod anywhere, and they walked in frosty, sun-kissed air, keenly exhilarating yet spicily warm. Snow capped the greater heights and seemed to clarify an atmosphere already clear, but the dales were free of snow and never more fit for walking than now when their boggy surface was dried up and roughened to the tread by crisp, granulated particles of frost.