"I'm sorry," she said kindly. "I can understand, oh, believe me, I can understand how you felt when you gave up the thought of going to India. I've learnt a lot lately; I've had to give up things myself. Life isn't all roses at Greystones, you know!"
He looked down at her.
"We've both lost some of the sparkle out of our eyes, Lucy," he said. "It's the price men and women have to pay for the possession of their own souls."
CHAPTER XI
The Back End
Lucy sat on the bridge that spanned the beck just above the farm. The water had diminished to a thin stream, trickling between the stones; the pools were nearly empty; the moss on the rocks was yellow instead of green. All things looked parched; even the marshes were dry. The summer had been as nearly rainless as a summer can be among the dales and fells.
Lucy's eyes were fixed upon the low grey house before her. The weeds, which grew between its rough slates, were dead; the feathery grasses, that found congenial crannies in the walls, drooped; the garden—a narrow patch between the door and the beck—was already seared by the hand of autumn.
But that which Lucy's eyes beheld was not the Greystones of to-day, gilded by the westering sun, but the Greystones of the days to come, swept by the rain, beaten by winds, or wreathed round and round by the whirling white sheets of a snow-storm.
In a few weeks' time winter would be here; long, wild nights would follow short, wild days; the sun would be blotted out, or rise above the mountain rampart for a few hours, roll across the dale like a red wheel, and plunge down behind another mountain rampart amid lurid mists, or smoky clouds.