Excerpt from The Mistress of Quest a Novel

Hill and valley lay silent in the baking heat of a sultry summer afternoon. There was no breeze, not even on the fell, where usually a light wind was wafted in the hottest days of July. But on this day the branches of the larches and rowan trees drooped motionless over the waters of the Force, and they themselves seemed to trickle languidly, as if their life were half extinguished by the summer drought. The sky was cloudless, and the rugged sides of the mountains seemed actually to quiver in the sunlight. Every fragment of flint on the roadside glittered like a diamond, the black and purple tints of the moorland were transfigured in a golden haze.

It was a day such as comes only now and then to the wild Cumberland fell-sides, and it touched even the sullen tarns among the mountain fastnesses and the bare stretches of upland, scanty in pasture, yellowed by the heat, to a new beauty and a splendour of colour such as no artist would fail to recognise.

High up among the hills, just between two great ascending spurs, with a background of receding mountains, and a sloping space before it, stood a grey stone house, with a low roof and quaint little dormer windows. A mountain stream dashed past it, with many a little natural fall and break, on its way from the tarns among the hills, to join the river in the valley far below.

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