Anne granted to herself that if one must take a holiday, this generous activity made nearly a venial matter of it. To climb these slopes was almost as satisfying to her body as to wash a long flight of steps, and she reached the top feeling as pleasantly tired as if she had done half a day’s charring. Still, she hadn’t charred, and there was in fact nothing which needed charring, nothing but a cleanliness which positively irritated her. She itched to be doing something and there was manifestly nothing to do except to enjoy herself. And if Anne Branstone was not doing a job, she liked, at any rate, to know that her next job was around the corner. She began, for the first time in her life, to feel a friendliness towards dirt. In the midst of this sprawling insolence of triumphant cleanliness, she hankered for a little humanizing soot. She could have loved her life-long enemy, and he did not appear... it was not a bit like Manchester. Far to the west, beyond a barrier of gleaming snow, she saw a murky cloud of smoke where the foul boot of industrialism stamps on the Lakeland Coast--a message and a call. It spoke, to her of natural dirt in this great waste of unstained purity; it made her sick for home and the thing she had to do. Effie and Sam stood gazing at the hills, spell-hound by loveliness, and when they tore their dancing eyes away it was to look into each other’s. They had no need of words: their eyes exulted in the burnished splendour of the scene, and with a doubled exultation each in the other’s joy. Then Sam turned hopefully to Anne and saw that she was looking with a rapt intensity at the west. At last, it seemed, the hills had touched her. “Where’s yon?” she asked, “yon smoke?” His face fell as he told her, but he saw that this explained Anne’s failure. She had not relished Marbeck because she had not seen it. She had not been looking at Marbeck, but all the while at something else. And why, he questioned, why, now that things had so admirably arranged themselves, must Anne still live in thought in Manchester? There seemed to him to be no law, nothing which could conceivably distract her attention, nothing which had not with genial finality been neatly finished off. Of course they had stupid legal business to come, but that was well ahead and, in any case, was not to worry them. She could not, surely, be troubling about Ada. It was he who had made the trouble there, insisting that Ada was “his job.”