A Daughter of Heth by William Black

AFTER MANY DAYS.

It was a Sunday morning in winter. For nearly a fortnight Airlie moor had been lying under a black frost. The wind that whistled through the leafless woods and swept over the hard ground was bitterly cold; the sky was grey and cheerless; the far stretch of the sea was more than usually desolate. The winter had come soon on the heels of autumn; and already all the manifold signs of life which had marked the summer were nipped off and dead. The woods were silent; the murmur of the moorland rivulet had been hushed, for its narrow channel contained a mass of ice; and the stripped and bare fields over which the piercing wind blew were hard as iron.