And beyond the vale, eastward and northward, Catherine looked out upon a wild sea of moors wrapped in mists, sullen and storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds hung deepest and inkiest over the high points of the Ullswater mountains.
When she was once below the pass, man and his world were shut out.
The girl figure in the blue cloak and hood was absolutely alone.

She descended till she reached a point where a little stream had been turned into a stone trough for cattle.

Above it stood a gnarled and solitary thorn.

Catherine sank down on a rock at the foot of the tree.

It was a seat she knew well; she had lingered there with her father; she had thought and prayed there as girl and woman; she had wrestled there often with despondency or grief, or some of those subtle spiritual temptations which were all her pure youth had known, till the inner light had dawned again, and the humble enraptured soul could almost have traced amid the shadows of that dappled moorland world, between her and the clouds, the white stores and 'sleeping wings' of ministering spirits.
But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this.