She was thin, but rather largely built, and her movements were quick and decided.

Her tweed dress was fashionably cut, but severely without small ornament of any kind.
She looked out upon a beautiful corner of English Lakeland.

The house in which she stood was built on the side of a little river, which, as she saw it, came flashing and sparkling out of a lake beyond, lying in broad strips of light and shade amid green surrounding fells.

The sun was slipping low, and would soon have kindled all the lake into a white fire, in which its islands would have almost disappeared.

But, for the moment, everything was plain:--the sky, full of light, and filmy grey cloud, the fells with their mingling of wood and purple crag, the shallow reach of the river beyond the garden, with a little family of wild duck floating upon it, and just below her a vivid splash of colour, a mass of rhododendron in bloom, setting its rose-pink challenge against the cool greys and greens of the fell.
But Bridget Cookson was not admiring the view.