Gwenda hated him for his persecution and exposure of the
helpless creature.
She walked on thinking.
It wouldn't end with Ally. They were all three exposed and persecuted.
For supposing--it wasn't likely, but supposing--that this Rowcliffe
man was the sort of man she liked, supposing--what was still more
unlikely--that he was the sort of man who would like her, where
would be the good of it? Her father would spoil it all. He spoiled
everything.
Well, no, to be perfectly accurate, not everything. There was
one thing he had not spoiled, because he had never suspected its
existence--her singular passion for the place. Of course, if he had
suspected it, he would have stamped on it. It was his business
to stamp on other people's passions. Luckily, it wasn't in him to
conceive a passion for a place.
It had come upon her at first sight as they drove between twilight and
night from Reyburn through Rathdale into Garthdale. It was when they
had left the wooded land behind them and the moors lifted up their
naked shoulders, one after another, darker than dark, into a sky
already whitening above the hidden moon. And she saw Morfe, gray as
iron, on its hill, bearing the square crown and the triple pendants of
its lights; she saw the long straight line of Greffington Edge, hiding
the secret moon, and Karva with the ashen west behind it. There was
something in their form and in their gesture that called to her as
if they knew her, as if they waited for her; they struck her with the
shock of recognition, as if she had known them and had waited too.
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