"I think that one outside will be for you." She recognized Janet's little cart and horse, and the youth lolling against the wheel smiled sheepishly. "Get in, miss." "You drove me last time, didn't you?" He nodded, gave an inarticulate assent, and shook the reins. The road was dim and the fields bordering it were like a darker sky where the primroses were stars, and slowly the other stars came out, while the cold green of the spring sky slipped, as at their bidding, into a matchless, immeasurable blue. The trees, and the hedges, and the houses lost their colours; all were but different shades of the dark except when a whitewashed building challenged the night. The glow of lighted lamps shone behind people's windows, dogs gave the travellers greeting, and voices and the clinking of pots came through the opened doors. The vision of a red-frocked child standing in a doorway flamed like a beacon in Theresa's memory. And slowly they drew away from habitations: the road was no longer enclosed by hedges; the land stretched black and free on either hand, and with the turn of the road they were beside the lake. It glistened, and its ripples stirred the reeds, and with every fiercer gust of wind its shining surface was troubled. The precipice on its farther shore was one great shadow streaked with the white of late-lying snow, and there was the sound of many little streams draining the moorland and trickling below the road to join the lake. The road, growing faint and thin, was threatened afar off by the spreading shoulders of the hills. Theresa tightened her muscles until they ached. She had no lack of feeling now, and a dumb exaltation at every breath of air she breathed was tangled with her horror and her happiness. Her pulses refused to keep time with the terrible slow sameness of the horse's pace and they leapt until she thought her very frame was shaken. She may have shuddered, or he may have felt her quiver, for the boy offered her another rug. "Here, miss," he said in his soft voice. She thanked him. "We are not very far from the lake's head, are we?" He was slow in answering, and his tones fell among the loose beating of the hoofs. "About a half a mile." "It is a long way." The hills were closing on them. The air seemed darker, and she could hear more water running to the lake--water wider and quicker than the little streams which had kept them company.