CHAPTER XVII.
GWENDA AT GARTHOWEN On the slope of the moor, where the autumn sun was burnishing the furze and purpling the heather, Morva sat knitting, her nimble fingers outrun by her busy thoughts.
She was sitting half way up the moor, an old cloak wrapped round her and its hood drawn over her head, for the wind was keen, blowing fresh from the bright blue bay, which stretched before her to the hazy horizon.

Her eyes gazed absently over its azure surface, flecked with white, as though with scattered snowflakes, and dotted here and there with the grey sails of the boats which the herring fishery called out from their moorings under the cliffs.

She sat at the edge of a rush-bordered pool in the peaty bog, occasionally bending over it to look at her own image reflected on its glassy surface.

Between the folds of the old cloak glistened the necklace of shells which Gethin had given her.

It was her twentieth birthday, so she seized the excuse for wearing the precious ornament which generally lay locked in its painted casket on the shelf at her bed head.