To the children there was music in the very name of the village from which Duntarvie was three miles distant uphill. And the square white-washed house – with its red-tiled steading (a paradise for climbers), its ponds, its ruined saw-mill, its haphazard garden full of gooseberries, currants and wizened tea-roses, – became a far dearer home than the one in town.

Their last summer at Duntarvie was that before Sholto’s death. For some reason there could be no renewal of the lease. Loud were the expressions of sorrow in the household and Juley, in spite of the enormous addition the place made to her domestic cares, was as sad as the children.

As for Joanna, her love for the place as the end of the time drew near increased to an agony, and more and more she withdrew her voice from the chorus of regret. Instead, when she could, she would leave the others, and run up and up the moor in front of the house, not once pausing till she reached a secret lair of her own finding – a dry, pale, golden bed among the high heather, close by the little firwood boundary with its rotting silvery fence, and there flinging herself on the ground she would bury her face in the sunwarmed moss and draw deep breaths of the earth.

Among these embraces lavished by the child on the earth, embraces more fervent than any she had given as yet to a human being, there was one that stood out for ever from the others.

One September morning during the last week of their stay she had slipped out a while before breakfast, taking her way through the fringe of beeches which ran up behind the house between steeply sloping fields till it enringed the upper pond. The lower pond, near the outhouses and the swing, was a homely puddle nozzled in by ducks and navigated by a raft made from the doors of an old shed with Joanna’s stilts as oars. But the upper pond, besides being twice the size of its neighbour, was a mysterious water. It was fed by a natural spring; and a legend of the neighbourhood told of a golden cradle in its depths containing the body of a King’s babe immune from mortal decay. It was rush-bound, betraying its treacherous surface in glints only, and wild fowl of many kinds made it their habitation. Foxes in the moonlight slunk to its edge to drink; and on an islet in the middle season after season a pair of herons reared their young.