Helen realised that she had walked too far just as daylight was beginning to fade.
As she looked around her, she was struck by the desolation of the country. During her long walk, she had met no one, and had passed no cottage. The high-banked lanes, which blocked her view, were little better than steep mudslides. On either hand rose the hills – barren sepia mounds, blurred by a fine spit of rain.
Over all hung a heavy sense of foreboding, as though the valley awaited some disaster. In the distance – too far away to be even a threat – rumbled faint, lumpy sounds of thunder.
Fortunately Helen was a realist, used to facing hard economic facts and not prone to self-pity. Of soaring spirit, yet possessed of sound common sense, she believed that those thinly veiled glimpses of hell – heaviness of body and darkness of spirit – could be explained away by liver or atmosphere.
Small and pale as a slip of crescent moon, she was only redeemed from insignificance by her bush of light-red springy hair. But, in spite of her unostentatious appearance, she throbbed with a passion for life, expressed in an expectancy of the future which made her welcome each fresh day and shred the interest from every hour and minute.
As a child, she pestered strangers to tell her the time, not from a mere dull wish to know whether it was early or late, but from a genuine curiosity to see their watches. This curiosity persisted when she had to earn her own living under the roofs of fortunate people who possessed houses
