He was on his way to Willsworthy, four miles from the parish church, at the extreme end of the parish, to pay a pastoral visit to Mistress Malvine, who was an invalid. Before reaching the house he came to a ruined chapel, that had not been used since the Reformation, and there he suddenly lighted upon Urith. His pale face flushed slightly. She was seated on a mass of fallen wall, with her hands in her lap, occupied with her thoughts. To her surprise, on her return late on the preceding night, before the breaking of the storm, her mother had not followed her accustomed practice of covering her with reproaches; and this had somewhat disconcerted Urith. Mrs. Malvine was a woman of not much intelligence, very self-centred, and occupied with her ailments. She had a knack of finding fault with every one, of seeing the demerits of all with whom she had to do; and she was not slow in expressing what she thought. Nor had she the tact to say what she thought and felt, and have done with it, she went on nagging, aggravating, exaggerating, and raking up petty wrongs or errors of judgment into mountains of misdemeanour, so that when at one moment she reproved such as had acted wrongly, she invariably in the next reversed positions, for she rebuked with such extravagance, and enlarged on the fault with such exaggeration as to move the innate sense of proportion and equity in the soul of the condemned, and to rouse the consciousness of injustice in the accused. Such a scene had taken place the previous day, when her mother, aided by the blundering Uncle Solomon, had driven Urith into one of her fits of passion, in which she had run away. When Mistress Malvine discovered what she had done--that she had actually pressed her child beyond endurance, and that the girl had run to the wilderness, where she could no more be traced, when the day and evening passed without her return, the sick woman became seriously alarmed, and faintly conscious that she had transgressed due bounds in the reprimand administered to Urith for rejecting the suit of Anthony Crymes. Consequently, when finally the girl did reappear, her mother controlled herself, and contented herself with inquiring where she had been. Luke Cleverdon knew Urith better than did his cousins; in his rambles on the moor, as a boy, he had often come this way, and had frequently had Urith as his companion. The friendship begun in childhood continued between them now that he was curate in charge of souls, and she was growing into full bloom of girlhood. He now halted, leaning both his hands on his stick, and spoke to her, and asked after her mother. Urith rose to accompany him to the house. "She is worse; I fear I have caused her trouble and distress of mind. I ran away from home yesterday, and might have been lost on the moor, had not"--she hesitated, her cheek assumed a darker tinge, and she said--"had not I fortunately been guided aright to reach home."