They set out early, for they had a good walk in front of them, and the April sun was hot. Hazel, under the pale green larch-trees, in her bright dress, with her crown of tawny hair, seemed to be an incarnation of the secret woods.
Abel strode ahead in his black cut-away coat, snuff-coloured trousers, and high-crowned felt hat with its ornamental band. This receded to the back of his head as he grew hotter. The harp was slung from his shoulder, the gilding looking tawdry in the open day. Twice during the walk, once in a round clearing fringed with birches, and once in a pine-glade, he stopped, put the harp down and played, sitting on a felled tree. Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait swung against her shoulder.
'If folks came by, maybe they'd think I was a fairy!' she cried.
'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction. 'It inna decent, now you're an 'ooman growd.'
'I'm not an 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly. 'I dunna want to be, and I won't never be.'
The pine-tops bent in the wind like attentive heads, as gods, sitting stately above, might nod thoughtfully over a human destiny. Someone, it almost seemed, had heard and registered Hazel's cry, 'I'll never be an 'ooman,' assenting, sardonic.
They came to the quarry at the mountain; the deserted mounds and chasms looked more desolate than ever in the spring world. Here and there the leaves of a young tree lipped the grey-white steeps, as if wistfully trying to love them, as a child tries to caress a forbidding parent.
They climbed round the larger heaps and skirted a precipitous place.
'I canna bear this place,' said Hazel; 'it's so drodsome.'
'Awhile since, afore you were born, a cow fell down that there place, hundreds of feet.'