Meanwhile, however, her husband was making a suggestion. She came back out of her dream to hear it. ‘Why shouldn’t you and I and Jim go up to Long Kern and watch them go down?’ he said, anxious to indemnify Jim as far as possible for the disappointment which his mother had inflicted. As soon as Gundred understood the proposition she gasped. This seemed almost too heavy a trial for her to bear. Then she suddenly understood that this was the sanctifying sacrifice that Heaven demanded of her. She must stand by and watch the fulfilment of her prayers so as to make the intervention of Heaven complete and holy. She signified her assent. ‘But we must be back in time for lunch, dear,’ she conditioned, living her dual life as ever, one-half of her personality dwelling perpetually in dining-rooms and drawing-rooms, while the other soared into the high domains of religious frenzy. Then, breakfast being over, she rose and went her way mechanically upon her household duties, pending the awful consummation of her destiny, at which she was so soon to assist. At the appointed time she was ready for the start. The others were waiting for her in the hall, and they proceeded silently up towards the hills. Jim was too excited to talk much; a scheme that demanded all his attention was budding in his brain; Gundred, by now, was moving in a remote world far above earthly speech, in communion with the invisible. Ivor himself vaguely discerned some strange exaltation beneath the restraint of Gundred’s mood, and was reluctant to intrude his conversation. And Kingston himself was so sick and tired of his long struggle to achieve the impossible recognition that he had not the heart nor the temper to say much to the perverse human individuality that intervened so bitterly between him and the eternal memory it contained. So they surmounted the long ridges of limestone, and came out at last upon the stretches of moor above that undulated gently upward towards the steep skirt of the Simonstone. The air that morning was clean and pure, filled with a white light and a bracing virility of tone; much rain had fallen in the last two days, and the atmosphere was moist and brilliant in colouring; great snowy ranges of cloud went sailing gloriously across the wet azure of Heaven, and the great mountain above towered high overhead in soft masses of brown and purplish green, while before them the moorland rolled away in waves of rust-coloured velvet, to where it suddenly ceased, in a sharp line that seemed the rim of the world, beneath which, far below, lay the broad valley and the plain-lands. The surface of the fell had folds and dimples and crests, but in the huge monotony of the expanse it appeared a waved sea of colour. Down the little gullies ran here and there a stream, riotous after the rains of over-night; here and there in the levels lay a small peat-pool that glittered like a forgotten silver shield among the sedges. And then they came at last to a deeper,