Dawn was at hand, and things began to loom through the blackness of mirk night. Gartnaidh snored on where he fell; but the gate-guards lay in their places, whether sleeping or waking the children could not know; and none could open the gate without stirring them.

Thorstein looked over the bulwarks and down into the gill. Black it was down yonder; and even the waterfall, into which he was used to throw stones for pastime, on the fellside over against them, had dwindled so that the white of it hardly showed. Beneath him the rock went sheer down for a space; and underneath, he knew that there were tufts of heather and saplings growing out of the scree-side that sloped from the crag. He stole breathless to one of the chambers where some little store of bedding and apparel lay, and brought out a bundle of girdlethongs and such like, and began to tie them into a line. But they were scantly enough to loop round a big stone, and to reach thence to the wall edge and a very little way overboard. He went back for an armful of skins: but how to rip them up into thongs without a knife?

Then Raineach crept up to the giant, and loosed his sword in the sheath: and as she rattled it, he gave a great groan: and she let go. But he sank into sleep again, and she drew it out. They cut the skins into strips, and knotted their line in haste, with trembling hands, and threw it over the wall.

Raineach sat on the edge, and clinging tight to the line, slid down hand under hand, fending herself off the crag with her feet, until they touched the rough scree-slope. Down came Thorstein, with the giant’s sword thrust naked through his girdle behind. Her heart beat lest the line should break, or the stones come away from the wall-coping upon them both: but at last he stood beside her, and they stumbled down the long slide of ruin to the gill. There was just light enough for them to cross it without being carried down the stream; and they scrambled up the other side on the grassy bank of the waterfall as steep as a hillside can be, all under those terrible hanging crags, in the glimmering dawn and the thunder-mist.

Then there was a roar and a crash, and splinters of stone flew about them. They saw the giant’s head over the bulwarks against the sky, and his long arms whirling as he took aim at them again. She screamed and they ran up-bank on hands and knees while the stones flew, and the curses and threats with them. But they never looked behind again until they were a good step out of the deepest of the ravine, and well up towards the moor, where the ground was not so dangerously steep; none the worse yet except for cutting their shins on the scree, and tearing their faces in the blackthorn bushes.

They stopped for breath, and a last sight of their prison: but they stopped only a moment, for the gate was opened and folk were running after them in the grey mist across the tongue of land. So they plunged into the birches and the bogs, and crept through the underwood, and waded through the tottermoss, startling the hag-worms beneath and the wild fowl above, as they beat their way up and ahead, hoping only to be lost and out of sight.

Then they came to a high ridge, with piked rocks standing on it, from which they could see that their homeward course was plain, over a great swamp and a bleak tarn, and along the green mountains beyond it. But from their rock they could trace the giant not so far behind, making his way through the wood, which was harder for him to force than for the lithe light bodies that could slip between its boughs, and over its half-dried, cracking mire-holes in which his bulk and weight stuck and sank continually. And yet he went at it with main strength, swinging his club and hewing a passage.

Down from their peak they flitted, and up he came from the other side, shadowy against the lurid sunrise. With a shout he strode over the edge, taking great steps against the sky, while they were lost in the maze of oozy rills, too broad for them to jump, and too deep and too treacherous to wade. While they looked wildly for their crossings, he leapt the ditches and gained on them, until at last he whirled his club round his head, and it flew hurtling through the air. They fell flat in the mire, and it skimmed close over them. Then they struggled to their feet and ran neck and neck for Blea tarn. Thorstein plunged in, dragging her after him, and struck out for the other side, sorely weighed down by her head on his shoulder, and well nigh choked by her grip round his neck; for she was no swimmer, and gasped and struggled in the black water. He landed her, though, upon a shoal, and up the bank they fled, on firmer ground now, and with a clear way before them and treeless, over stones and grass, forward and upward to Ullscarf.

But a terrible roar came up from the tarn; and they looked back, and saw the giant near the middle of it, fighting with the black water, and lashing it into foaming waves that circled and spread until all the mere was in a turmoil. And then his head went under: but he rose again, flapping and battling like a wounded heron. Then he sank again, and once more came to the surface, drifting like a log in an eddy. And then the water closed over him, black and calm, and the pattern of the mountain tops began to take shape where he had been. The children stood fixed to the spot. A stream of bubbles rose, and burst; and the reflections joined again. Raineach turned suddenly on Thorstein and dealt him a blow that felled him to the ground: she burst into a passion of weeping, as she flung herself beside him. “Thou hast killed my father,” she wailed: “I hate thee, I hate thee!”

Thorstein was in no mood to say good or bad to her, so utterly weary was he: least of all to make love-speeches. He lay awhile, and the tarn-water ran from him upon the grass.

“Listen, Raineach,” he said at last: “I hear the shouts of the men that follow us afar.”

“O lad,” she cried, “dear lad, take me with thee.”

So they climbed the ridge, and held by it on the farther side, hidden from their pursuers, and saw them no more.

But now the day had broken, a dismal day of thunder mist and gathering storm. The highest tops were lost, not in their homely cloud-caps, but fading away into black vapour; and through the rents in it the sun shot beams of coppery and swarthy sheen, down into the smoky dells and tumbling precipices, that seemed to ditch their moorland road on either hand. The long rise and fall of Ullscarf before them looked like a vast bridge in the air, and leading nowhither but into darkness. Far to the right, gaps in the gloom showed awful edges of mountain, rolling and plunging along the skyline, as wheels that moved, great toppling balls advancing slowly over hill and dale, wayward and unescapable. Nigher at hand were huge monsters, mis-shapen and grey and foul to see; many-headed things, with eyes and crests and spiny backs, crouching along the naked ground, among white and bleaching bones in the black soil. And when the children came nearer, hoping to slip by, for there was no other way, these things became great boulders, as it might be images of unknown dragons of dreamland, or they were weird tussocks of grass on black and embattled towers and pinnacles of crumbling peat, that took the shape of laidly worms and all the terrors of winter-night tales.

They won their way over the bridge in air, down through the silky green mosses and heatherless moor-grasses, to Greenup raise: for they dared not try the valleys on either hand in fear of losing the only way they knew, the safe and solitary ridge that must bring them southward and homeward. But the darkness deepened, and then came a flash and an instant crack and roar that sent them speeding upward in panic. Then the storm began, flash upon flash of blue light, terrifying and bewildering, as they scudded through the din and rattle of hail, blindly seeking shelter: and dashed into a nook of white shattered rocks, an island on the great heaving billow of moor. As they crushed themselves into the bield, some ugly beast with a snarl and white teeth pushed out, and fled past them into the storm. And there they cruddled, in shelter at last: and such was their weariness and the heaviness of the air, that they knew no more until they awoke wondering.

For the sky was violet-blue above them, and the sun was going down among torn flitters of cloud-wreck. All around, the mountains were hard-edged and dark purple, with streaks and stripes and slashes of dim white from the hail and sudden cold. The children crept out, shivering and tottering.

“Oh, Thorstein,” sobbed the lass, “I can go no farther: let us lie down and die here.”

But he comforted her, and bade her lean on him, and led her up the moor, slowly and painfully toiling, until step by step they gained a rocky pike among white tables of stone and strange pillars and domes and curving hollows, like the icebergs they tell of in the far northern seas. And looking homeward in the twilight from that tower, they saw a deep dark valley below, and weary fells on the other side, and dells and mountain moors. But beyond, far beyond, a gleam of water and a rising shadow of mountain beside it, that wiped off the stars from the southern sky. Aye, and Thorstein greeted as he held the poor lass up to look at the strip of light in the distance. “It is my mere, it is our own mere, Raineach. I know it!”

How they came down Langdale side in the darkness they could never tell. From ledge to ledge, among the hammers and knots of rock, clambering and groping for foot-hold and hand-hold, sliding sometimes down the screes and losing one another in the deep fern: but still descending, even when they were swept down the mazes of the black gills and the torrent beds roaring from the rain-storm: lightheaded with hunger, and reckless from fatigue, they reached the valley.

Guided by a red spot of firelight they came upon the huts of the poor folk who had harboured them on their outward journey: and there they found food and a respite from their travelling; and made a ready tale how the men had gone to the war and sent them home. For if they had let it be known that Gartnaidh was dead, it was odds but the fell-folk would have been rough and mishandled them. But for pity’s sake they were good, and made them welcome, and wondered how they had come through the storm unscathed. They housed them, and fed them, as long as they would bide, and then set them a good step on their way, until they struck the path over Hawkshead moor and down Rusland pool to the Leven.

As they came within sight of Leven firth and the well known hills, wooded softly and winsome after the horrible ruggedness of the mountains, Thorstein laughed and sang and shouted for joy, and stepped briskly forward. “Come along, lass,” he cried, “come along with thee! Yonder is Legbarrow, and the sands of Leven: a bit more and we shall see Greenodd. Home, lass, home! Step out. Why, what ails thee, silly?”

“Oh, Thorstein, I dare not. My heart is like water within me, and my head works sore.”

“Aye, poor thing, little tired thing. I’ll help thee along. See: yonder is our howe: and the smoke from Greenodd. See the bonny fields and flocks in them; and ah! they have built a new cottage by the ford, and sown a bit of the intake on the fell. There’s Greenodd, Raineach: there it is; our own house!”

“Nay, Thorstein, I can go no farther. My feet are broken, and my knees are trembling. Oh let me be, and leave me.”

“Why, lass, it is but a step. Well, then: well, then: bide here if thou must, and look for me back in a hop, skip and jump to lait thee.”

She saw him trip off with no more farewell; and then she dragged herself up into a wild apple tree, and it began to grow dark: and she waited for him, sick at heart. Then the night fell, and still she waited for him.