"Let us go a little higher up the moors," she said, "I know every little track, and beck, and dingle for miles round. When I lived here with my father, I used to sit an hour or two with him every day, on the other side of the table, reading aloud, and answering the questions he asked me. But he never talked to me, or took me on his knee, or kissed me; and I thought all fathers were the same. The rest of the day I had to myself, and I spent my time here, out of doors."
"And in the winter when there was snow or rain?" asked Philip.
"I read all day long," she went on. "See on the roof there, between two gables, is a little dormer window. There my secret room is. I really believe nobody knew of it but me; and I used to stay there till I was nearly starved and famished. But there was no one to ask me where I had been, or what I'd been doing."
"Poor child!" said Philip unconsciously. The color mounted to Dorothy's face, and she turned away from him a little.
"It is all different now," she continued, after a momentary silence, "you are all so kind and good to me. And I think sometimes that when my father died he too went to a place where everyone is good and kind to him and tries to make up to him for his life here; for he was more lonely and unhappy than I was. I was only a child, and he was a man. I should not like to feel that his death had made me so happy, if it has not made him happy too."
"My mother has always told us that death itself comes to us out of the love of God," said Philip.
He had followed Dorothy along a narrow track, and now they were out of sight of the house. A wide, undulating upland, whose limits were almost lost in the darkening sky, stretched as far as the eye could see. The sun was gone down, but a frosty light lingered in the west. The keen, sweet air played around them; and Dorothy drew in a deep breath, and stretched out her arms, with a caressing gesture, to the wide landscape. She looked more at home here than Phyllis would have done. Phyllis would have seen but little beauty in so wild and solitary a spot. Perhaps it was better that she had not seen her future home for the first time in the winter.
Philip retraced his steps, with Dorothy beside him, in a more tranquil frame of mind. She did not shun conversation about Phyllis; and though nothing was acknowledged between them, he was sure she knew of their love for one another. What was more likely than that Phyllis had told her?
They went back to the house slowly through the deepening twilight, Dorothy pointing out distant objects which neither of them could distinguish in the darkness, though she fancied she saw them, so familiar and so dear they were to her. He looked at the wide, open, dusky landscape, and the broad sky above them, and the picturesque old house, with light shining through the many windows, from Dorothy's point of view. But what would Phyllis think of it, with her dainty, fastidious ways, and her love of society?
As they passed through the great gates into the forecourt Andrew Goldsmith met them.