About face and figure there was a delicate austere charm, something which harmonized with the bare stretches and lonely crags of the fells, something which seemed to make her a true daughter of the mountains, partaker at once of their gentleness and their severity.

_She_ was in her place here, beside the homely Westmoreland house, and under the shelter of the fells.

When you first saw the other sisters you wondered what strange chance had brought them into that remote sparely peopled valley; they were plainly exiles, and conscious exiles, from the movement and exhilarations of a fuller social life.

But Catherine impressed you as only a refined variety of the local type; you could have found many like her, in a sense, among the sweet-faced serious women of the neighboring farms.
Now, as she and Rose stood together, her hand still resting lightly on the other's shoulder, a question from Agnes banished the faint smile on her lips, and left, only the look of inward illumination, the expression of one who had just passed, as it were, through a strenuous and heroic moment of life, and was still living in the exaltation of memory.
'So the poor fellow is worse ?' 'Yes.

Doctor Baker, whom they have got to-day, says the spine is hopelessly injured.