There was no more sullenness in his expression.
Margaret's hand still played restlessly with the handkerchief.

Her eyes were far away, her mind absorbed by the story of her own fate.
Round the moorside, on which the cottage was built, there bent a circling edge of wood, now aflame with all the colour of late autumn.

Against its deep reds and browns, Margaret's small profile was thrown out--the profile already of the old woman, with the meeting nose and chin, the hollow cheek, the maze of wrinkles round the eyes.

Into that face, worn by the labour and the grief of the poor--into that bending figure, with the peasant shawl folded round the head and shoulders--there had passed all the tragic dignity which belongs to the simple and heartfelt things of human life, to the pain of helpless affection, to the yearning of irremediable loss.
The boy beside her was too young to feel this.

But he felt more, perhaps, than any other lad of the moorside could have felt.