No; it was only a sheep that had strayed from its fold, and had taken shelter from wind and rain beneath a stone in a narrow cleft, and was now sending up into the night the pitiful cry of a lost and desolate creature.
No, no, no; nowhere would the hills give up the object of his search; and Ralph walked on and on with a heart that sank and still sank.
He knew these trackless uplands as few knew them, and not even the abstraction of mind that came with these solitary hours caused him an uncertain step.

On and on, through the long dark night, to the Stye Head once more, and again along the range of the rugged pikes, calling the mare by the half-articulate cry she knew so well, and listening for her answering neigh, but hearing only the surging of the wind or the rumble of the falling ghyll; then on and on, and still on.
When the earliest gleams of light flecked the east, Ralph was standing at the head of the Screes.

Slowly the gray bars stretched across the sky, wider and more wide, brighter and more bright, now changed to yellow and now to pink, chasing the black walls of darkness that died away on every side.

In the basin below, at the foot of the steep Screes, whose sides rumbled with rolling stones, lay the black mere, half veiled by the morning mist.

Still veiled, too, were the dales of Ireton, but far away, across the undulating plains through which the river rambled, flowed the wide Western Sea, touched at its utmost bar by the silvery light of the now risen sun.
Ralph turned about and walked back, with the flush of the sky reflected on his pale and stony face.