Around the abrupt corner an entirely new perspective was revealed—a little hamlet, built on a shoulder of the mountains; and on the right, below a steep descent, a wide and sunny valley. It was like a tiny world of its own, hidden in the bosom of the hills. There was a long line of farm-buildings, built of gray stone and roofed with red tiles; there were fifteen or twenty stacks; a quaint, white-washed house of considerable size, almost covered on the southward side with creepers; a row of cottages, and a gray-walled enclosure—stretching with its white tombstones to the very brink of the descent—in the midst of which was an ancient church, in ruins at the further end, partly rebuilt with the stones of the hillside.
Louise looked around her, silent with wonder. A couple of sheep-dogs had rushed out from the farmhouse and were fawning around her companion. In the background a gray-bearded shepherd, with Scottish plaid thrown over his shoulder, raised his hat.
"It isn't real, is it?" she asked, clinging for a moment to John Strangewey's arm.
He patted one of the dogs and smiled down at her.
"Why not? William Elwick there is a very real shepherd, I can assure you. He has sat on these hills for the last sixty-eight years."
She looked at the old man almost with awe.
"It is like the Bible!" she murmured. "Fancy the sunrises he must have seen, and the sunsets! The coming and the fading of the stars, the spring days, the music of the winds in these hollow places, booming to him in the night-time! I want to talk to him. May I?"
He shook his head. The old man was already shambling off.
"Better not," he advised. "You would be disappointed, for William has the family weakness—he cannot bear the sight of a woman. You see, he is pretending now that there is something wrong with the hill flock. You asked where the land was that we tilled. Now look down. Hold my arm if you feel giddy."
She followed the wave of his ash stick. The valley sheer below them, and the lower hills, on both sides, were parceled out into fields, enclosed within stone walls, reminding her, from the height at which they stood, of nothing so much as the quilt upon her bed.