"In a passion! What about?"
"My mother and Uncle Solomon worried me."
"What about?"
"That I will not tell you, though you beat me with your long stick."
"You know well enough, little owl, that I will not strike you."
"I know nothing, save that you are a bully."
"What! because I will not leave you on the moor to perish? Be reasonable, Urith. I am doing for you the best I can. I could not suffer you to remain uncared for on this waste. That would indeed be inhuman. Why, at sea it is infamy for a sailor to leave a wrecked vessel uncared for if he sights it."
There was reason in what he said. That she admitted in her heart. In her heart, also, she was constrained to allow that the difficult situation into which she had fallen was due to her own conduct. Anthony Cleverdon was behaving towards her in the only way in which a generous lad could behave towards one found astray in the wilderness. But she was angry with him because he was too dull to see that there were difficulties in the way in which he proposed to restore her to her home, difficulties which she could not, in delicacy, express.
Anthony did not press her to speak further. He led the way now, and she followed; whereas, at first, she had preceded, in her angry humour, and to maintain the notion that she was being driven against her will. Occasionally he turned to see that she had not run away. She was chary of speech, out of humour, partly with him—chiefly with herself.
The way led from one granite tor to another, through all the intricacies of fissured bog, till at length the two travellers reached a sensible depression or slope of the land, and now the water, instead of lying stagnant in the clefts, began to run, and presently in a thousand rills filtered down a basin of turf towards a bottom, where they united in a river-head.