Trees, steeples, villages, stood up clear and vivid everywhere in the valley beneath, remote and tiny in the depths; but where each river coiled and writhed through woodland, there coiled and writhed across the face of the earth a monstrous sleepy dragon of white vapour. Higher up, again, in the narrower mountain valleys, wherever water flowed, the runnels of its course were filled with a dense bellying mass like pale smoke. From the hills behind, too, from the stern, deep-channelled country of fell and moor, rolled down towards the lowlands of Strathclyde great sluggish remoras of mist, blotting out each hollow in a snowy void, and leaving only here and there a little islet of dark rock or heather in the white swirling sea of their tide, as they lapped and curled round the lesser hills below. As the sun grew stronger, their volume momentarily ebbed and melted, but in the first moments of day the glen of Ivescar brimmed over with their confused currents, beneath the brow of the Simonstone, and as Kingston gazed down over the edge, he looked into a blank and woolly vacancy. While he stood there Isabel approached. There was no more battle, no more challenge in her air. Knowledge of the truth was enough for the hour. In the cold clear purity of dawn the ardours and agonies of passion could have no place. Kingston and she had found the great secret of their common life; no more words were needed. Kingston turned to her. ‘We may as well be starting down,’ he said. ‘It will be easy enough now. I only hope Gundred has not been in a great state of anxiety. Did you get any sleep?’ ‘It was a bony bed,’ replied Isabel, ‘but I managed to rest quite fairly. But I feel utterly tired and squashed. Do let us go home, and get fed and cleaned and decent again.’ ‘In a few minutes,’ said he, ‘we shall hardly be able to believe we have ever been up here. This night will seem like fancy.’ ‘Or else we shall feel that we have been up here all our lives, since the very beginning of things. Kingston, I was angry with you, but you have taken me up on to a mountain, and showed me more beautiful things than I ever thought there were in the world. I have been thinking. Perhaps I understand a little better now.’ He studied the calm radiance of her face. The sun fell full upon it, gilded and glorifying. ‘Yes, Isabel,’ he said, ‘we must do what we can. We must try to--to honour ourselves. I am glad you begin to understand. After all, nothing can take away the thought of what we have found together up here, you and I. And we must not let that thought get spoiled, Isabel. How pompous I sound, though!’ She sighed. ‘I am always running my head up against the walls of life,’ she answered. ‘I think I do see now what a mistake I made. I hurt myself and you. Oh, I shall never pretend to have conventional morals like you, but I am beginning to understand that self-denial is sometimes a splendid form of self-indulgence.’