To the happiest walking there would come strange sinkings of the heart, unaccountable premonitions of overhanging doom.

There the least superstitious would start at the sight of a toad, and come upon three magpies at once not without fear.

Over all was a breath of imminent disaster, a look of sorrow from which there was no escape.

It was not many yards away from a merry high-road, but once in the shade of its lanes, it seemed as though you had been shut away from the world of living men.

Black slopes of pine and melancholy bars of sunset walled you in, as in some funeral hall of judgment.
Alas! Beatrice's was not the happiest of hearts, and all day long this autumn, as the mornings came later and darker and the evenings earlier, always voices in the valley, voices of low-hanging mist and dripping rain, kept saying: "Death is coming! Death is coming!" Tapped at the windows, ticking and crying in the rooms, was the same message; till, in a terror of the walls, she would flee into the wider prison of the woods, and oppressed by them in turn, would escape with a beating heart into the honest daylight of the high-road.