On that day, she had walked over to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her betrayer the fulfilment of his promise of marriage.

He had laughed at her, and she had fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those torturing terrors which only a woman _in extremis_ can know.

And on her way back she had seen the ghost or 'bogle' of Deep Crag; the ghost had spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having received what she at once recognized as her death sentence.
What had she seen?
An effect of moonlit mist--a shepherd-boy bent on a practical joke--a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks?
What had she heard?
The evening greeting of a passer by, wafted down to her from some higher path along the fell?
distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath her feet?
or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature?
Who can tell?
Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost.

The legend of the ghost--of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor every Midsummer Night with her moaning child upon her arm--had flashed into Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists.
To see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by the phantom voice was death.

No one so addressed could hope to survive the following Midsummer Day.