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Updated: June 4, 2025
The days were carved for her in the lines of the hills and painted for her in their colors; days that were dim green and gray, when the dreaming land was withdrawn under a veil so fine that it had the transparency of water, or when the stone walls, the humble houses and the high ramparts, drenched with mist and with secret sunlight, became insubstantial; days when all the hills were hewn out of one opal; days that had the form of Karva under snow, and the thin blues and violets of the snow.
Grouse shot up from your feet with a "Rek-ek-ek-kek!" in sudden, explosive flight. Plovers rose, wheeling round and round you with sharper and sharper cries of agitation. "Pee-vit pee-vit pee-vit! Pee-vitt!" They swooped, suddenly close, close to your eyes; you heard the drumming vibration of their wings. Away in front a line of sheep went slowly up and up Karva.
Sometimes, returning from his northerly rounds, he would send the trap on, and walk back to Morfe by Karva, on the chance. Once, when the moon was up, he sighted her on the farther moors beyond Upthorne, when he got down and walked with her for miles, while his man and the trap waited for him in Garth. But that was reckless.
She would have stretched the way out indefinitely if she could; she would have piled Garthdale Moor on Greffington Edge and Karva on the top of them and put them between Garth and Morfe, so violent was her fear of Steven Rowcliffe. She had no longer any desire to see him or to be seen by him. He had seen her twice too often, and too early and too late.
And he smiled and said to himself, "She's doing it for fun, pure fun." The third time he came upon her at dawn with the dew on her skirts and on her hair. She darted away at the clank of his horse's hoofs, half-savage, divinely shy. And he said to himself that time, "I'm getting on. She's aware of me all right." She had come down from Karva, and he was on his way to Morfe from Upthorne.
It discerned in these things a power that would before long make her suffer. She had no other sense of them. She came to the drop of the road under Karva where she had seen Rowcliffe for the first time. She thought, "I shall never get away from it." Far off in the bottom the village waited for her.
July passed. It was the end of August. To the west Karva and Morfe High Moor were purple. To the east the bare hillsides with their limestone ramparts smouldered in mist and sun, or shimmered, burning like any hillside of the south. The light even soaked into the gray walls of Garth in its pastures. The little plum-trees in the Vicarage orchard might have been olive trees twinkling in the sun.
Mary thought again, and said, "The fields." He was glad she hadn't said "The moor." They strolled past the village and turned into the pasture that lay between the high road and the beck. The narrow paths led up a slope from field to field through the gaps in the stone walls. The fields turned with the turning of the dale and with that turning of the road that Rowcliffe knew, under Karva.
If only she could go back to her real life. But she couldn't. She couldn't feel any more her sudden, secret happiness. Maurice Jourdain had driven it away. It had nothing to do with Maurice Jourdain. He ought not to have been able to take it from you. She might go up to Karva Hill to look for it; but it would not be there. She couldn't even remember what it had been like. New Year's night.
Only, though Mary did not know it, he came as often as not in the evenings at dusk, just after the Vicar had been put to bed. When it was wet he sat in the dining-room with Gwenda. When it was fine he took her out on to the moor under Karva.
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