He traced it yet farther back to that night at Dunbar, when, at the prompting of what he mistook for mercy, he had saved the life of the enemy that was to wreck his own life and the lives of all that were near and dear to him.

To his tortured soul guilt seemed everywhere about him, whether his own guilt or the guilt of others, was still the same; and now God had given this dread disaster for a sign that vengeance was His, that retribution had come and would come.
Was it the dream of an overpowered imagination--the nightmare of a distempered fancy?
Yet it would not be shaken off.

It had bathed the whole world in another light--a lurid light.
Ralph walked fast over the fells, snatching at sprigs of heather, plucking the slim boughs from the bushes, pausing sometimes to look long at a stone, or a river, or a path that last night appeared to be as familiar to him as the palm of his hand, and had suddenly become strange and a mystery.

The shadow of a supernatural presence hung over all.
Throughout that day he walked about the fells, looking for the riderless horse, and calling to it, but neither expecting to see nor to hear it.

He saw once and again the people of Wythburn abroad on the errand that kept him abroad, but they never came within hail, and a stifling sense of shame kept him apart, none the less that he knew not wherefore such shame should fall on him, all the same that they knew not that it had fallen.
The day would come when all men would see that God's hand was on him.
Yes, Ralph; but when that day does indeed come, then all men shall also see that whom God's hand rests on has God at his right hand.
When the darkness was closing in upon a second night, Ralph was descending High Seat towards Shoulthwaite Moss.