“Whisht, whisht! – you’re no to go forth greeting. My lamb, it’s best for you – I’m no sorry for you,” cried Peggy, with a sob; “here’s your tea – a good cup of tea’s a great comfort; and here’s some sandwiches – eat them when you can on the road, for I see you’ll no put a morsel within your lips at Marchmain. And now, my darling hinny, it’s good daylight, and here’s your bundle, and you’ll hev to go.”

The parting was sore but brief, and Susan stood without in the early sunshine before she knew what had happened to her, holding unconsciously but tightly the bundle in one hand, and Peggy’s old leather purse in the other, and hearing closed behind her, with an inexorable certainty and swiftness, which was poor Peggy’s artifice to hide her own grief, and to shorten the pang of their farewell, that remorseless door of Marchmain. The desolate girl stood for a moment, blind with tears, on the step. Her fate was accomplished. There lay the moor, with the world beyond, strange, unfamiliar, bewildering – and her home, cold as it was, had closed upon her for ever. The first thrill of that reality was so dreadful to Susan, that she might have fallen and fainted upon the cold threshold where she still stood, holding by the doorpost to support herself, but for an incident that roused her. A window opened above – the window of her father’s room. She looked up eagerly, thinking that perhaps he might have relented. Something, magnified and blurred in form by the tears which filled her eyes full, fell from above, and descended heavily at her feet; but no one appeared at the window, which was instantly closed. She stooped down to lift it, trembling. It was another purse, not so homely as Peggy’s, containing no note or word of farewell as she had hoped for a moment, but merely another five-pound note. With a strange access of anger and disappointment, Susan threw it from her upon the step of the door. “Give it to Peggy —her money is better to me!” she cried aloud, with involuntary indignation; and then brushing the tears from her eyes, set out upon her journey without looking behind, her whole heart and frame tingling with wounded feeling and injured pride.

That cold and grudging provision for her wants, thrown to her at the last moment, transported Susan with a sudden touch of passion foreign to her nature; it sent her across the moor at a speed which she could not have equalled under any other circumstances. The dew was on the early heather-bells, and the solitary golden flower-pods which lighted the dark whin bushes opened under her eye to the morning sun; but though the scene had many charms at that hour and season, and though the whins and straggling seedlings caught her dress as if to detain her, the young wayfarer made no pause.

“The tears that gathered in her eye
She left the mountain breeze to dry.”

And pushing forward, with all the sudden force of a sensitive nature, urged beyond strength or patience, pressed along the rustling moorland path, without once turning her eyes to look upon that house from which the last gleam of hope disappeared with her disappearance. Henceforth all life of youth and light of affection were severed from Marchmain.