be helped in her lifelong penance.  This done, she had strengthened herself to bear all that might come to her with that resignation of remorse which demands no rights and inherits no joys.  She was not one of those emotional half-hearted creatures who resolve one day, break down the next, and drift always.  For good and evil alike she had the power to hold where she had gripped and to maintain what she had undertaken; and even her life at Windy Brow did not shake her.

And that life might well have shaken both a stronger mind and even a more resolute will than hers.

A square stone house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of growth—­a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of line, merely a rugged, lonesome, square stone tent set up on a mountain-spur, as it would seem for the express reception of tortured penitents not seeking to soften sorrow,—­this was Windy Brow, the patrimony of the Gryces, where Keziah, Emmanuel’s eldest sister, lived and had lived these sixty years and more.

The house stood alone.  Monk Grange, the hamlet to which it geographically belonged—­a place as bleak and bare as itself, and which seemed to have been flung against the fell-foot as if a brick-layer’s hodman had pitched the hovels at haphazard anyhow—­was two good miles away, and the market-town, to be got at only by crossing a dangerous moor, was nine miles off—­as far as Sherrington from North Aston.

The few poor dwellers in Monk Grange had little to do with the market-town.  They lived mostly on what they managed to raise and rear among themselves—­holding braxy mutton good enough for feast-days, and oatmeal porridge all the year round the finest food for men and bairns alike.  As for the gudewives’ household necessaries, they were got by the carrier who passed once a fortnight on their road; and for the rest, if aught was wanting more than that which they had, they did without, and, according to the local saying, “want was t’ master.”

Society of a cultured kind there was none.  The clergyman was an old man little if it all superior to the flock to which he ministered.  He was a St. Bees man, the son of a handloom weaver, speaking broad Cumberland and hopelessly “dished” by a hard word in the Bible.  He was fond of his glass, and was to be found every day of his life from three to nine at the Blucher, smoking a clay pipe and drinking rum and milk.  He had never married, but he was by no means an ascetic in his morals, as more than one buxom wench in his parish had proved; and in all respects he was an anachronism, the like of which is rare now among the fells and dales, though at one time it was the normal type for the clergy of the remoter North Country districts.