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looking like golden stars in the deepening darkness .
    Annie could not have hurried had she tried. She had just lived through the most exciting experience of her young and drab existence and she still dreamed in it and in the dazzling remembrance of the man who had captured her innocent heart. She would see him tomorrow. She was to 'take dinner' with him at The Packhorse. She hadn't the faintest idea how she was to manage it since her father knew her every movement, or at least he did until today, but she would do it somehow, she told herself airily as she skipped along the last bit of track which led to the farmgate of Browhead.
    “ Wheer's t'girl?" her father had asked her mother. The men of Lakeland were thrifty, not only with their emotions – of any kind – and with their cash which was more often than not in short supply, but with their words.
    “ She'll not be far away, Joshua," her mother had faltered placatingly and when Joshua Abbott had demanded to know exactly where that might be, Lizzie Abbott could not tell him for after twenty years of marriage to him, twenty years of servitude and uncommunicative constraint to his dour and unbending will, indeed ever since she had come to Browhead as a trembling bride of sixteen, her mental processes had become severely hampered by her fear of him .
    Her mind had gone dead as Joshua waited for an answer. Her tongue had stuck to the roof of her mouth and though he had never struck her or their daughter, she had cowered away from him as though expecting a blow .
    He was waiting for Annie where the farm track ran down to the road. He hit her for the first time that evening.
    “ Where've tha' bin, girl?" he wanted to know, and who with? which were the words he most wanted to speak for since the night of the 'boon clip' when she had danced in such a lively fashion with Davy Mounsey, his dejected and faltering hope of a son had risen like air. Not a son, of course, but the next best thing. His farm and Jem Mounsey's allied in marriage and a man who has land, even if it comes with a bride attached to it, will look after it. He'd tie it up, naturally, so that it would still be Abbott's farm, Abbott's land, with his grandchildren working on it, but now, in the space of a day, since he had left this morning feeling more optimistic than he had for years, she had threatened the tentative dream he had allowed himself and set it to shaking and crumbling like a weakened drystone wall. All dressed up in some flibbertigibbet's gown — not even recognising the dress in which his own wife had married him and in which she had looked as pretty as a hedge rose — she had been off somewhere on her own and returned so flushed and brilliant he could only suspect the worst .
    She refused absolutely to tell him since she did not want to involve her mother who was grovelling by the fireside like a whipped dog and when Joshua opened the door and pointed silently out into the yard she had gone, her head high and defiant, her cheek swollen, the flesh about her eye already beginning to change colour.
    “ Tha'll sleep in t' barn tonight, girl," he said to her, "wheer't th'animals sleep an' in t' mornin' thee an' me'll 'ave summat to say to one another. Think on it an' remember this. No one defies me in me own 'ouse. Now get out theer an' get some sleep fer there's a field ter be ploughed tomorrow. ”
    The walk back to Keswick was long and dark and her clogs blistered her bare feet. She did not weep nor did she do much thinking except to repeat the words which had sung in her head ever since Anthony had winked audaciously at her over the footlights and stolen her innocently beating heart .
    `I love him, I love him, I love him,' the song went and the rhythm of it moved her tired body along the deserted road. The night was inky black. She could see nothing, only her country senses keeping her on the track where she might have blundered into the dangerous and densely packed tree trunks of Dodd Wood on her