CHAPTER X.

'And Michal sleeps among the roots and dews.'-Paracelsus.

OR several weeks Wilfrid said nothing to Katharine about Thorgerd or about going away. Time went on so very much as it used to do a year ago, that she sometimes wondered whether what had passed were true. The only difference was, that she felt older, greyer, more staid than ever. She had never had much experience of 'youth,' and at four-and-twenty she seemed to have passed most of the incidents looked forward to by girls, and to have before her a somewhat blank expanse of future, which, if Wilfrid married, must be filled, as best it might, by one lonely woman.

At present she had, however, very little time for thinking of personal concerns. Business fully occupied her attention; and it seemed as if she had resumed the reins of affairs at a troublous period.

Wilfrid had begun the use of a patent in his beaming place, which enabled him to dismiss several of his hands, thus throwing them temporarily out of work. He was immediately served with a notice, worded quite respectfully, representing that he was causing distress to many families by the use of the obnoxious machinery, and requesting him to have it removed, and to resume the old method. No notice was taken of the hint. Wilfrid laughed at the missive, flicked it aside with his finger, and said it would come to nothing, speaking with easy contempt, as men often do speak of unobtrusive opposition, when they are unused to being opposed at all.

Katharine feared it was but the beginning of annoyances. She appealed one day to

Earnshaw.

What would he do, if he were in Wilfrid's place? He backed up his master's course, and said that if he were Mr. Healey, he should, now that he had seen how the patent worked in one instance, furnish the other rooms with the same. Katharine, to her own surprise, found herself riding home with a lighter heart.

After that there was a slight pause. No further advice was given to Mr. Healey upon the subject of patents, or anything else. Katharine took her daily rides, and did her daily work. In their domestic life the most notable thing was that Louis Kay was 'conspicuous by his absence.' Katharine never saw him, and was happy in the idea that she had really given him his dismissal, once for all, upon that miserable morning the morrow of a night which she never remembered

without trembling.

Sometimes, when she reminded herself that

she was not going to be married to Louis Kay,

she felt as if heavy chains had dropped from her. And yet she tried to be sorry, and to think how kind he once was. But it was of no use she was glad, delighted that she was free from him; and she hoped she might never meet him, chiefly because she feared that she should smile into his face, and show him how much more light-hearted she was since she had fairly and openly quarrelled with him.

One afternoon she rode home from the colliery by Bentfoot village, a roundabout way, along a dree lonely road, with a low stone wall at one side, in the interstices of which flourished tufts of moorland grass or bents, and long, feathery, serrated bunches of Pollipodium vulgaris-alias 'pollypoddy.'

On the other side, for some distance, were high banks, cliffs, and rocks; above them the moors rolled and swept away for dreary, lonely miles. Waterfalls came tumbling down their beds of black stone, with each its woody fringe of hardy stunted

oak and graceful mountain-ash

now, bare

and skeleton-like, darkening the hillside. By degrees the cliffs became lower; almost from the road rose the moor, or rather its bordersrough-looking meadows of coarse grass, full of 'brambles,' briar-rose bushes, and rank, stronggrowing weeds. It would have been a purely country road, only that here and there rose a thing like a squat stumpy-looking chimney; they were 'ventilators' for the long railway tunnel, which ran for a mile and a-half beneath road and moor.

On the left hand was what Katharine considered rather a goodly prospect. There was a lower road, with meadows sloping up to the one on which she rode; beyond that was the canal, and from the canal swept ridge after ridge of heath-clad moor, dark, gloomy, iron-grey in the February afternoon; each ridge growing higher, and culminating in the solid wall of Blackrigg in the distance. Down in the valley were mills, farms, cot